Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  • Germany

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – German poet, statesman, thinker and naturalist. Born on August 28, 1749, in the old German trading city of Frankfurt am Main in the family of the prosperous burgher Johann Caspar Goethe (1710-1782). The first poetic experiments of Goethe refer to the age of eight. In 1765 he went to the University of Leipzig, where he satisfied his craving for reading and to try all genres and styles of the Enlightenment, so that by the age of 19, when a serious illness forced him to stop his studies , he already mastered the techniques of versioning and drama and was the author of a fairly large number of works, most of which were later destroyed. In Strasbourg, where in 1770-1771 Goethe completed his legal education, and in the following four years in Frankfurt, he was the leader of a literary riot against the principles established by Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766) and the theorists of the Enlightenment.

The most important of Goethe’s works produced before he went to Weimar were Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a tragedy that was the first work to bring him recognition, and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) (1774), which gained him enormous fame as a writer in the Sturm und Drang period which marked the early phase of Romanticism. Goethe died in 1832, in Weimar of apparent heart failure.

 

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