Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe

After his wife’s death Goethe became anxious that arrangements should be made for the marriage of his son August, who had for some time had an official appointment at Weimar. Go...

On his twenty-second birthday (August 28, 1771), the day after his arrival at home, Goethe applied to be admitted as one of the advocates of Frankfort. A few days afterwards he...

At Leipsic Goethe settled in two pleasant rooms in a house near the university, overlooking a court through which people were constantly passing to and fro. He happened to arriv...

During the next period of Goethe’s life, extending from 1794 to 1805--that is, from his forty-fifth to his fifty-sixth year--the central facts are those relating to his friendsh...

Weimar, pleasantly situated in the valley of the Ilm, is now known by name to all the world, thanks mainly to Goethe’s association with it. At the time when he arrived there, it...

Goethe was in his thirty-ninth year when he returned to the little capital from which he was never again to be so long absent. His visit to Italy had done for him all, and more...

Yet another great conception stirred Goethe’s imagination at Frankfort--the conception of “Faust.” With the Faust legend he had long been familiar, and in “Die Mitschuldigen” he...

At the time of Schiller’s death, days of terrible public disaster were swiftly approaching. In the summer of 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was formed, and the rickety Holy...

His grandfather, Frederick George Goethe, who sprang from a family belonging to the working class, and was himself a tailor, made his way, in the latter part of the seventeenth...

Hardly had Goethe set foot on Italian ground when he began to feel something of the joy and elasticity of temper for which he had been longing. He was absolutely his own master...

Goethe takes the oath as an advocate and citizen of Frankfort; holds a Shakespeare festival; reads the autobiography of Goetz von Berlichingen; writes the drama, “Geschichte Got...

Marriage of August Goethe with Ottilie von Pogwisch; Goethe gives up the directorate of the Weimar Theatre; Wilhelmine Herzlieb; Marianne von Willemer; Ulrica von Levezow; celeb...

Weimar; Goethe’s relations to the Duke, the Duchess, and the Duchess Dowager; Wieland; Herder settles at Weimar; the Duke proposes that Goethe shall enter the public service; op...

Benefit derived from his sojourn in Italy; relieved of most of his ministerial duties; change in his relations to Frau von Stein; his informal marriage with Christiane Vulpius;...

Goethe at Leipsic; nominal studies at the university; dejection, and recovery of his usual good spirits; his love for Annette Schönkopf; forms many friendships; takes lessons in...

Schiller arrives at Weimar in 1787; his character; meets Goethe for the first time; settles as a professor at Jena; his marriage; Goethe calls upon him in 1790, and they talk ab...

The battle of Jena; Weimar plundered by the French; Goethe’s life saved through Christiane’s presence of mind; his helpfulness in a time of public trial; his formal marriage wit...

Goethe begins to write “Faust”; the work in its earliest form; the character of Faust; the story of Gretchen; Mephistopheles; Goethe expresses in the original “Faust” his own mo...

Delight in Italy; the “Italienische Reise”; journey to Rome; arrives in Rome, October 29, 1786; attempts to think himself back into the Rome of ancient times; his study of ancie...

Goethe born, August 28, 1749; his grandfather and grandmother; his father, Johann Kaspar Goethe; his mother; his sister Cornelia; a child of an imaginative temperament; his gran...