Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the dominant figure of German letters and worked at Faust for nearly sixty years. Born in Frankfurt in 1749 into a wealthy family, he was educated privately and at Leipzig and Strasbourg, where Herder introduced him to Shakespeare and to folk poetry. The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774 when he was twenty-four, made him famous across Europe. Its hero, rejected in love, kills himself; young men adopted its blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and a wave of imitative suicides was attributed to it. Napoleon told Goethe he had read it seven times. In 1775 he accepted an invitation from the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar and spent the rest of his life there, holding real administrative office — mines, roads, finance, the war commission and the court theatre — and becoming a privy councillor. He fled to Italy for two years from 1786 and returned committed to classical form; the Italian Journey records it. He worked seriously in science, publishing on plant morphology, discovering the human intermaxillary bone, and writing a Theory of Colours attacking Newton's optics, which was wrong as physics and valuable on perception. His friendship and correspondence with Schiller from 1794 until Schiller's death is central to German literature. Faust occupied him from his twenties to the year of his death: part one published in 1808, part two sealed until after he died. Its scholar sells his soul for experience and is redeemed by striving. He died in Weimar in 1832, aged eighty-two.

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