Jojann Wolfang Goethe Biography
Early life
Goethe's father, Johann
Caspar Goethe, lived with his family in a large house
(today the Goethe House) in Frankfurt, then an Imperial Free City
of the Holy Roman Empire.
Though he had studied law in Leipzig and had been appointed Imperial
Councillor, he was not involved in the city's official affairs.[5] Johann Caspar married
Goethe's mother, Catharina
Elizabeth Textor at Frankfurt on 20 August 1748, when he was 38
and she was 17.[6] All their children, with the
exception of Johann Wolfgang and his sister, Cornelia Friederica Christiana,
who was born in 1750, died at early ages.
Goethe's birthplace in
Frankfurt (Großer Hirschgraben)
His father and private
tutors gave Goethe lessons in all the common subjects of their time, especially
languages (Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English and
Hebrew). Goethe also received lessons in dancing, riding and fencing. Johann Caspar, feeling
frustrated in his own ambitions, was determined that his children should have
all those advantages that he had not.[5]
Although Goethe's great
passion was drawing, he quickly became interested in literature; Friedrich
Gottlieb Klopstock and Homer
were among his early favorites. He had a lively devotion to theater as well and
was greatly fascinated by puppet shows that
were annually arranged in his home; this is a recurrent theme in his literary
work Wilhelm
Meister's Apprenticeship.
He also took great pleasure
in reading works on history and religion. He writes about this period:
I had from childhood the
singular habit of always learning by heart the beginnings of books, and the
divisions of a work, first of the five books of Moses,
and then of the 'Aeneid' and Ovid's
'Metamorphoses'. ... If an ever busy imagination, of which that tale may bear
witness, led me hither and thither, if the medley of fable and history,
mythology and religion, threatened to bewilder me, I readily fled to those
oriental regions, plunged into the first books of Moses, and there, amid the
scattered shepherd tribes, found myself at once in the greatest solitude and
the greatest society.[7]
Goethe became also
acquainted with Frankfurt actors.[8] Among early literary
attempts, he was infatuated with Gretchen, who would later reappear in
his Faust
and the adventures with whom he would concisely describe in Dichtung und
Wahrheit.[9] He adored Caritas Meixner
(1750–1773), a wealthy Worms
trader's daughter and friend of his sister, who would later marry the merchant
G. F. Schuler.[10]
Legal career
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| Mendelssonh plays to Goethe |
Goethe studied law at Leipzig University
from 1765 to 1768. He detested learning age-old judicial rules by heart,
preferring instead to attend the poetry lessons of Christian
Fürchtegott Gellert. In Leipzig, Goethe fell in love with Anna
Katharina Schönkopf and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre. In 1770, he anonymously
released Annette, his first collection of poems. His uncritical
admiration for many contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing and Christoph
Martin Wieland. Already at this time, Goethe wrote a good deal,
but he threw away nearly all of these works, except for the comedy Die
Mitschuldigen. The restaurant Auerbachs Keller and its legend of Faust's
1525 barrel ride impressed him so much that Auerbachs Keller became the only
real place in his closet drama
Faust Part One.
As his studies did not progress, Goethe was forced to return to Frankfurt at
the close of August 1768.
Goethe became severely ill
in Frankfurt. During the year and a half that followed, because of several
relapses, the relationship with his father worsened. During convalescence,
Goethe was nursed by his mother and sister. In April 1770, Goethe left
Frankfurt in order to finish his studies at the University of
Strasbourg.
In Alsace, Goethe blossomed. No other
landscape has he described as affectionately as the warm, wide Rhine area. In
Strasbourg, Goethe met Johann Gottfried
Herder. The two became close friends, and crucially to Goethe's
intellectual development, Herder kindled his interest in Shakespeare,
Ossian and in the notion of Volkspoesie
(folk poetry). On 14 October 1772 Goethe held a gathering in his parental home
in honour of the first German "Shakespeare Day". His first
acquaintance with Shakespeare's works is described as his personal awakening in
literature.[11]
On a trip to the village Sessenheim, Goethe fell in love with Friederike Brion, in October 1770,[12][13] but, after ten months,
terminated the relationship in August 1771.[14] Several of his poems, like
"Willkommen und Abschied", "Sesenheimer Lieder" and "Heidenröslein", originate from this time.
At the end of August 1771,
Goethe acquired the academic degree of the Lizenziat (Licentia docendi) in Frankfurt and established a small legal practice. Although in his
academic work he had expressed the ambition to make jurisprudence progressively more
humane, his inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first cases,
and he was reprimanded and lost further ones. This prematurely terminated his
career as a lawyer after only a few months. At this time, Goethe was acquainted
with the court of Darmstadt, where
his inventiveness was praised. From this milieu came Johann Georg Schlosser
(who was later to become his brother-in-law) and Johann Heinrich
Merck. Goethe also pursued literary plans again; this time, his
father did not have anything against it, and even helped. Goethe obtained a
copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants'
War. In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a
colourful drama. Entitled Götz von
Berlichingen, the work went directly to the heart of
Goethe's contemporaries.
Goethe could not subsist on
being one of the editors of a literary periodical (published by Schlosser and
Merck). In May 1772 he once more began the practice of law at Wetzlar. In 1774 he wrote the book
which would bring him worldwide fame, The Sorrows
of Young Werther. The outer shape of the work's plot is
widely taken over from what Goethe experienced during his Wetzlar time with Charlotte Buff (1753–1828)[15] and her fiancé, Johann
Christian Kestner (1741–1800),[15] as well as from the suicide
of the author's friend Karl Wilhelm
Jerusalem (1747–1772); in it, Goethe made a desperate passion of
what was in reality a hearty and relaxed friendship.[16] Despite the immense success
of Werther, it did not bring Goethe much financial gain because
copyright laws at the time were essentially nonexistent. (In later years Goethe
would bypass this problem by periodically authorizing "new, revised"
editions of his Complete Works.)[17]
Scientific work
See also: Goethean science
As
to what I have done as a poet,... I take no pride in it... But that in my
century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of
colours—of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a
consciousness of a superiority to many.Although his literary work has attracted the greatest amount of interest, Goethe was also keenly involved in studies of natural science.[38] He wrote several works on morphology, and colour theory. Goethe also had the largest private collection of minerals in all of Europe. By the time of his death, in order to gain a comprehensive view in geology, he had collected 17,800 rock samples.
His focus on morphology and what was later called homology influenced 19th century naturalists, although his ideas of transformation were about the continuous metamorphosis of living things and did not relate to contemporary ideas of "transformisme" or transmutation of species. Homology, or as Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire called it "analogie", was used by Charles Darwin as strong evidence of common descent and of laws of variation.[39] Goethe's studies (notably with an elephant's skull lent to him by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring) led him to independently discover the human intermaxillary bone, also known as "Goethe's bone", in 1784, which Broussonet (1779) and Vicq d'Azyr (1780) had (using different methods) identified several years earlier.[40] While not the only one in his time to question the prevailing view that this bone did not exist in humans, Goethe, who believed ancient anatomists had known about this bone, was the first to prove its existence in all mammals. The elephant's skull that led Goethe to this discovery, and was subsequently named the Goethe Elephant, still exists and is displayed in the Ottoneum in Kassel, Germany.
During his Italian journey, Goethe formulated a theory of plant metamorphosis in which the archetypal form of the plant is to be found in the leaf – he writes, "from top to bottom a plant is all leaf, united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other".[41] In 1790, he published his Metamorphosis of Plants.[42][43] As one of the many precursors in the history of evolutionary thought, Goethe wrote in Story of My Botanical Studies (1831):
The ever-changing display of plant forms, which I have followed for so many years, awakens increasingly within me the notion: The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, they have been given... a felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.[44]
Goethe's botanical theories were partly based on his gardening in Weimar.[45]
Goethe also popularized the Goethe barometer using a principle established by Torricelli. According to Hegel, "Goethe has occupied himself a good deal with meteorology; barometer readings interested him particularly... What he says is important: the main thing is that he gives a comparative table of barometric readings during the whole month of December 1822, at Weimar, Jena, London, Boston, Vienna, Töpel... He claims to deduce from it that the barometric level varies in the same proportion not only in each zone but that it has the same variation, too, at different altitudes above sea-level".[46]
Goethe outlines his method in the essay The experiment as mediator between subject and object (1772).[51] In the Kurschner edition of Goethe's works, the science editor, Rudolf Steiner, presents Goethe's approach to science as phenomenological. Steiner elaborated on that in the books The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception[52] and Goethe's World View,[53] in which he characterizes intuition as the instrument by which one grasps Goethe's biological archetype—The Typus.
Novalis, himself a geologist and mining engineer, expressed the opinion that Goethe was the first physicist of his time and 'epoch-making in the history of physics', writing that Goethe's studies of light, of the metamorphosis of plants and of insects were indications and proofs 'that the perfect educational lecture belongs in the artist's sphere of work'; and that Goethe would be surpassed 'but only in the way in which the ancients can be surpassed, in inner content and force, in variety and depth—as an artist actually not, or only very little, for his rightness and intensity are perhaps already more exemplary than it would seem'. [54]
The original 1808 German title page of Goethe's play read simply: "Faust. / Eine Tragödie" ("Faust. / A Tragedy"). The addition of "erster Teil" (in English, "Part One") was retrospectively applied by publishers when the sequel was published in 1832 with a title page which read: "Faust. / Der Tragödie zweiter Teil" ("Faust. / The Tragedy's Second Part").
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| Artistic representation Faust |
The two plays have been published in English under a number of titles, and are usually referred to as Faust, Parts One and Two.
Faust Part One) first edition, 1808)
·
Heinrich Faust, a scholar, sometimes said to be based on Johann Georg Faust,
or on Jacob Bidermann's dramatized
account of the Legend of the Doctor of Paris, Cenodoxus;
see also Faust
·
Gretchen, Faust's love (short for Margarete; Goethe uses both forms)
·
Marthe, Gretchen's neighbour
·
Valentin, Gretchen's brother
·
Wagner, Faust's attendant
Faust Part One takes place in multiple settings, the first of which
is Heaven. The demon
Mephistopheles makes a bet with God: he says that he can lure God's favourite
human being (Faust), who is striving to learn everything that can be known,
away from righteous pursuits. The next scene takes place in Faust's study where
Faust, despairing at the vanity of scientific, humanitarian and religious
learning, turns to magic for the showering of infinite knowledge. He suspects,
however, that his attempts are failing. Frustrated, he ponders suicide, but
rejects it as he hears the echo of nearby Easter celebrations
begin. He goes for a walk with his assistant Wagner and is followed home by a
stray poodle (the term then
meant a medium-to-big-size dog, similar to a sheep dog). In Faust's study, the poodle transforms into Mephistopheles. Faust makes an arrangement with him: Mephistopheles will do everything that Faust wants while he is here on Earth, and in exchange Faust will serve the Devil in Hell. Faust's arrangement is that if he is pleased enough with anything Mephistopheles gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, then he will die in that moment.
When Mephistopheles tells Faust to sign the pact with blood, Faust complains that Mephistopheles does not trust Faust's word of honor. In the end, Mephistopheles wins the argument and Faust signs the contract with a drop of his own blood. Faust has a few excursions and then meets Margaret (also known as Gretchen). He is attracted to her and with jewelry and with help from a neighbor, Martha, Mephistopheles draws Gretchen into Faust's arms. With Mephistopheles' aid, Faust seduces Gretchen. Gretchen's mother dies from a sleeping potion, administered by Gretchen to obtain privacy so that Faust could visit her. Gretchen discovers she is pregnant. Gretchen's brother condemns Faust, challenges him and falls dead at the hands of Faust and Mephistopheles. Gretchen drowns her illegitimate child and is convicted of the murder. Faust tries to save Gretchen from death by attempting to free her from prison. Finding that she refuses to escape, Faust and Mephistopheles flee the dungeon, while voices from Heaven announce that Gretchen shall be saved – "Sie ist gerettet" – this differs from the harsher ending of Urfaust – "Sie ist gerichtet!" – "she is condemned."
Faust, Part Two ( first edition, 1832)
Rich in classical allusion, in Part two the romantic story of the first Faust is put aside and Faust wakes in a field of fairies to initiate a new cycle of adventures and purpose. The piece consists of five acts (relatively isolated episodes) each representing a different theme. Ultimately, Faust goes to Heaven, for he loses only half of the bet. Angels, who arrive as messengers of divine mercy, declare at the end of Act V: "He who strives on and lives to strive/ Can earn redemption still" (V, 11936–7).
Relationship between the parts
Throughout Par t One, Faust remains unsatisfied; the conclusion of the tragedy and the outcome of the wagers are only revealed in Faust Part Two. The first part represents the "small world" and takes place in Faust's own local, temporal milieu. In contrast, Part Two takes place in the "wide world" or macro cosmos.
With affection,
Ruben
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| Wolfang Goethe |
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