56 Facts About Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic.

Goethe's works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour.

Goethe is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language, his work having a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day.

Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement.

Goethe contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.

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Goethe's poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler.

Goethe had a devotion to theater as well, and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows that were annually arranged in his home; this became a recurrent theme in his literary work Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

Goethe took great pleasure in reading works on history and religion.

Goethe studied law at Leipzig University from 1765 to 1768.

Goethe detested learning age-old judicial rules by heart, preferring instead to attend the poetry lessons of Christian Furchtegott Gellert.

In Leipzig, Goethe fell in love with Anna Katharina Schonkopf and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre.

Goethe 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 1775, Goethe was invited, on the strength of his fame as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, to the court of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who would become Grand Duke in 1815.

In 1776, Goethe formed a close relationship with Charlotte von Stein, an older, married woman.

The intimate bond with her lasted for ten years, after which Goethe abruptly left for Italy without giving his companion any notice.

Goethe's was emotionally distraught at the time, but they were eventually reconciled.

In 1779, Goethe took on the War Commission of the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, in addition to the Mines and Highways commissions.

In 1782, when the chancellor of the Duchy's Exchequer left his office, Goethe agreed to act in his place and did so for two and a half years; this post virtually made him prime minister and the principal representative of the Duchy.

The author W Daniel Wilson claims that Goethe engaged in negotiating the forced sale of vagabonds, criminals, and political dissidents as part of these activities.

Goethe's father had made a similar journey, and his example was a major motivating factor for Goethe to make the trip.

Goethe's written account of these events can be found within his Complete Works.

In 1794, Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe offering friendship; they had previously had only a mutually wary relationship ever since first becoming acquainted in 1788.

In 1806, Goethe was living in Weimar with his mistress Christiane Vulpius, the sister of Christian A Vulpius, and their son August von Goethe.

Goethe was petrified, Christiane raised a lot of noise and even tangled with them, other people who had taken refuge in Goethe's house rushed in, and so the marauders eventually withdrew again.

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In 1821, having recovered from a near fatal heart illness, the 72-year-old Goethe fell in love with Ulrike von Levetzow, 17 at the time.

Goethe is buried in the Ducal Vault at Weimar's Historical Cemetery.

Goethe's writings were immediately influential in literary and artistic circles.

Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntalam, which was one of the first works of Sanskrit literature that became known in Europe, after being translated from English to German.

Goethe admitted that he "shot his hero to save himself": a reference to Goethe's own near-suicidal with a young woman during this period, an obsession he quelled through the writing process.

Goethe said he "turned reality into poetry but his friends thought poetry should be turned into reality and the poem imitated".

Goethe finished Faust Part Two in the year of his death, and the work was published posthumously.

Goethe's words inspired a number of compositions by, among others, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Wolf.

Goethe had the largest private collection of minerals in all of Europe.

Goethe's 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.

Goethe's studies led him to independently discover the human intermaxillary bone, known as "Goethe's bone", in 1784, which Broussonet and Vicq d'Azyr had identified several years earlier.

Goethe popularized the Goethe barometer using a principle established by Torricelli.

In 1810, Goethe published his Theory of Colours, which he considered his most important work.

Goethe's work inspired the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, to write his Remarks on Colour.

Goethe was vehemently opposed to Newton's analytic treatment of colour, engaging instead in compiling a comprehensive rational description of a wide variety of colour phenomena.

Goethe was a freethinker who believed that one could be inwardly Christian without following any of the Christian churches, many of whose central teachings he firmly opposed, sharply distinguishing between Christ and the tenets of Christian theology, and criticizing its history as a "hodgepodge of fallacy and violence".

Goethe was critical of the radicalism of Bentham and expressed sympathy for the prudent liberalism of Francois Guizot.

Goethe produced volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, a theory of colours and early work on evolution and linguistics.

Goethe was fascinated by mineralogy, and the mineral goethite is named after him.

Goethe would argue that Classicism was the means of controlling art, and that Romanticism was a sickness, even as he penned poetry rich in memorable images, and rewrote the formal rules of German poetry.

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Goethe's poetry was set to music by almost every major Austrian and German composer from Mozart to Mahler, and his influence would spread to French drama and opera as well.

Goethe came away from the meeting deeply impressed with Napoleon's enlightened intellect and his efforts to build an alternative to the corrupt old regime.

Goethe always spoke of Napoleon with the greatest respect, confessing that "nothing higher and more pleasing could have happened to me in all my life" than to have met Napoleon in person.

Goethe met with her and her partner Benjamin Constant, with whom he shared a mutual admiration.

Goethe exerted a profound influence on George Eliot, whose partner George Henry Lewes wrote a Life of Goethe .

Goethe became a key reference for Thomas Mann in his speeches and essays defending the republic.

Goethe emphasized Goethe's "cultural and self-developing individualism", humanism, and cosmopolitanism.

Federal Republic of Germany's cultural institution, the Goethe-Institut, is named after him, and promotes the study of German abroad and fosters knowledge about Germany by providing information on its culture, society and politics.

Goethe's influence was dramatic because he understood that there was a transition in European sensibilities, an increasing focus on sense, the indescribable, and the emotional.

Goethe praised Francis Bacon for his advocacy of science based on experiment and his forceful revolution in thought as one of the greatest strides forward in modern science.

Goethe's views make him, along with Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Ludwig van Beethoven, a figure in two worlds: on the one hand, devoted to the sense of taste, order, and finely crafted detail, which is the hallmark of the artistic sense of the Age of Reason and the neo-classical period of architecture; on the other, seeking a personal, intuitive, and personalized form of expression and society, firmly supporting the idea of self-regulating and organic systems.