Child of a fortunate family, high bourgeoisie ennobled, minister of state, but before any man of letters who, evolving of the exaltation of Sturm und Drang to a more traditional art, controls all the kinds - novel, poetry, theater, Mémoires, literary journalism, even scientific work -, Goethe worked out an immense work, dominated by two universal masterpieces, Werther and Faust.  

When, in 1774, the Sufferings of the Werther young person appear, its author places Germany in the foreground of the European literature. He will maintain it there for more than one half-century, in precursor of the romanticism, with as much of success in the novel than in the drama or poetry.

Female meetings
He grants his Leipzig, then in Strasbourg. Its readings go then from Homère to Shakespeare and Ossian. If Kätchen Schönkopf, met in 1766, had been at the origin of some poems, Frederique Brion, the girl of Pasteur de Sesenheim, a village close to Strasbourg, will be the object of a short but intense love, which will cause the Songs of Sesenheim. The life and the work of Goethe will be thus punctuated often fugacious female meetings, but almost always pretexts with poetic creation. In 1772, the young bachelor of law is trainee attached to the Supreme court of the Saint Worsens, in Wetzlar (Hesse), where it makes knowledge with Charlotte Buff, of which it gets excited, but which is promised in marriage to one of his/her friends. Appeared two years later, a novel writes in one month, the Sufferings of the Werther young person, present of many reminiscences of this stay and this unhappy love affair. In January 1775, new love, with engagement at Easter and rupture with the autumn: Elisabeth Schönemann will be Lili of a cycle of poems. There will be still many extreme passions in the life of Goethe, of Charlotte von Stein, platonic relation but of a great influence, in Marianne von Willemer. In 1788, in Weimar, Goethe meets Christiane Vulpius, whom he will marry in 1806, after long years of common life. For it, which gives him five children - of which only one will survive -, he will not write anything.  

Herder and Schiller
Two meetings, male this time, will deeply mark the life and the work of Goethe. The first is that of Herder, since 1770, in Strasbourg. For this researcher and thinker of the literature of his country, poetry can be born only from the heart of the people; the genius alone, released of the influence of the reason, is able to draw its inspiration there. Young person, Goethe sends his works to him. They will publish some works together, but will be scrambled when Herder joins his/her friend in Weimar. The second capital meeting is that of Schiller, in 1787, at the origin of an intense friendship, which will finish only with the death of the author of the Brigands, in 1805. The two men influence in a decisive way: in 1797 (das Balladenjahr, “the year of the ballades”), the two writers are in continual communication: their letters will constitute most of bulky Correspondance of Goethe. Their ballades are then published jointly, and it is Schiller which will push Goethe to complete its Faust.

The writer in his time

The traveller
For its time, Goethe is a large traveller, name which he likes besides to give himself (der Wanderer). He traverses Hesse and Alsace, and always he writes. To its stay with Wetzlar Werther goes back of course, but also a first outline of Faust and a historical drama in the style of Shakespeare, Götz von Berlichingen. In 1775, it goes on a first journey in Switzerland, but especially it goes to Weimar, with the invitation of the grand duke Karl August. Entered one year later with the service of this one, it goes to Berlin, turns over to Switzerland, goes to Silesia, takes part with its guard in the countryside of France against the armies of the Revolution, whereas itself was ennobled by the emperor Joseph II since 1782. It will attend thus with the battle of Valmy and the head office of Mainz. Of this itinerant life, its work will carry the mark, of the part Hermann and Dorothée, which puts in scene two “shepherds” taken in the torments caused by the Revolution, with the Dialogs of German emigrants, which present the noble ones which, having fled the battle, are joined together in a castle and philosophize.  

But the great voyage of all the creators remains still that of Italy then. In 1786, Goethe, which finds exciting little the tasks that the grand duke entrusted to him, flees towards the peninsula. There there remain two years, draw, paint, written, while travelling to Venice, Rome and Naples, where he makes several times the rise of Vesuvius. Returned in 1788 in Weimar - from where he will escape again a little later for a news and short equipped Italian -, he takes again his service at Karl August. This prince warned, which made come to its court a writer whose reputation does not cease growing, accepts very it, for example this voyage, that Goethe undertook without waiting to be authorized there, as a running away. Thanks to this patron, the writer will profit throughout his life from stations sometimes completely honorary, sometimes invested real responsibilities: librarian of the court, but also minister of state. On its return of Italy, it gives up the governmental business and occupies various functions, of which that of director of the theater of the court.  

The wise one of Weimar
It is the time of the intense relation with Schiller and the resumption of work on Faust, under the protection of Karl August, who finds an appreciable counterpart with his benevolence, the prestige of Goethe flashing back on the principality: all the writers and the philosophers who count will make the voyage from Weimar to greet it, of Herder with Klinger. This last is the author of Sturm und Drang (1776), a drama which will give its name to a decisive movement for the German literature: “storm and dash” will be caused by innovative writers - the first of which Goethe - which, eager to upset the artistic guns of their time, invent a new literature while following the impulses of their genius. Will also come to Weimar Jean-Paul, Novalis, Tieck and the Mound-Fouqué, Achim von Arnim, but also Hegel, and even Schopenhauer, little time before the death of Goethe. But the influence of the writer is not only arts person: it receives the Alexandre tsar, meets Napoleon - who read Werther and which gives the Legion of honor to him -, Kaiser, the king of Bavaria, Metternich. This intense activity prevents it of nothing from working with passion in its Farbenlehre (the Theory of the colors) - without however managing to oppose to the discoveries of Newton irrefutable arguments -, and to impassion itself for the music - he intended to play a child prodigy named Mozart, and Beethoven will compose a partition for his Egmont.  

In 1823, a last blaze in love, for a seventeen year old young girl, is at the origin of admirable Elégie of Marienbad. The last years of the writer are occupied by scientific work and the drafting of the news and maxims of the Years of voyage of Wilhelm Meister and of Second Faust. It frequently receives Johann Peter Eckermann, who will publish, of 1836 to 1848, its Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann. On March 22nd, 1832, little time after having entrusted to a close relation: “Which am I? What did I create? I very received, very accommodated, assimilated all that passed to my range”, Goethe dies in Weimar, where it is buried in the princely family vault.  
 

The theater
The passion of Goethe for the scene and the dramatic writing - which dates, according to him, of its earliest youth and a certain puppet theater offered by his/her grandmother - makes him accept the direction of the theater of the court. The drama in prose Götz von Berlichingen evokes a historical character, the Knight with the iron hand, which had taken the party of the peasants revolted against the emperor at the time of the Reform, and was famous for the greenness of its language. Egmont puts in scene Flemish resistance to the Spanish occupation. The French revolution is evoked in the epopee in worms Hermann and Dorothée. But the central figure of its work remains that of Faust. God and Méphistophélès dialog during the prolog. Méphisto will be able to try Faust, the desperate scientist who knows all that human can know, except happiness. With the assistance of the devil, Faust reached with the richness, knowledge, the magic power, the love of Marguerite, of which it causes the loss. In Second Faust, it reaches with the power at the court of the emperor, seeks the supreme beauty at Helen of Troy, but their child dies and Helene turns over to the Hells. Faust, which causes around him loss and desolation by its absence of scruples, will die, but transfigured by the love, the eternal female. The lesson of this epilog, written by a very old man, is that Titan Faust found happiness neither in the richness, neither in science, nor in the power.  

The novel
Goethe novelist makes cry all Europe with its Werther, and provides to generations of young Germans a model with his Wilhelm Meister, work monumental to which he works during most of his life. The Elective affinitieses are an application under investigation moral world of the laws of biology at the same time as a tragic death and love story. As for are Poetry and Truth, which the share of poetry and which is that of the truth in these memories of childhood and youth whose Goethe, since 1808, undertakes the drafting, to which it works until 1831? If Werther is emblematic of Sturm und Drang, the Years of training of Wilhelm Meister mark the appearance of a new literary kind, the novel of education, or Bildungsroman: the hero learns the life, the theater, the love and wisdom, that one even as all its contemporaries recognized in Goethe.  

Other works
1786 Iphigénie in Tauride  
1789 Torquato Tasso  
1797 God and the Bayadere  
1797 Been engaged of Corinth  
the 1819 Couch Eastern-Westerner  

© Commune of Bologna

Bologna was a big step on the Italian way which led Goethe to Florence, then in Rome. He reports this memorable voyage in his Newspaper which he held in order to inform his friend Charlotte Von Stein remained in Germany in Weimar. From its Newspaper and its correspondences of Italy, in particular with his/her friend Herder, Goethe will draw some on a 1813 “Journey in Italy”. One feels a great enthusiasm on the part of the writer by traversing the pages of the manuscript, especially for the discovery of the places and the characteristics of this country which attracted it so much.

Its stay in Bologna began on on October 18th, 1786, at the same time as its catches of notes on its pleasant cultural excursions downtown. Goethe describes with admiration works which he visits in Bologna like the Holy Cecile de Raphaël, the frescos of Francesco Francia, the tables of Carracci or those of Guido Reni.

Area around Bologna, Goethe seems not to appreciate the dialect of which he says: “Bolonais It is a rough and chopped horrible dialect (...)”. But he admired, the green hills of the neighborhoods of Bologna. He with pleasure remembers his walks, he to him often the idea had just remained longer in Bologna.