(1749-1832)

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. -- Goethe

Goethe was born in 1749 in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany, the oldest of six children -- although only he and a sister survived into adulthood. His father, Johann Kaspar Goethe, was a well-to-do lawyer and amateur scholar, but a failure in politics and with an unpleasant disposition. His mother, Katharina Elisabeth Textor was considerably more pleasant, and was the daughter of the bürgermeister (mayor) of Frankfurt.

Young Goethe was a handsome and talented youth, learned languages easily, and was interested in music and art. He entered the University of Leipzig to study law, but a disappointment in love led him to sickness and depression, and he left school. In 1771, however, he received his law degree from the University of Strasbourg.

His early reading of Bayle's Dictionary led him to renounce his Christianity as a teenager and become an atheist. He later mellowed a bit, and adopted a pantheism modeled after Spinoza's.

In 1774, he wrote Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (the Sorrows of Young Werther), a tragic love story that, though panned by the critics, was wildly successful, especially among young romantic intellectuals.  The book concludes with a suicide which was, sadly, imitated by a number of lovesick readers.  Like many of his works, the story emphasized the tensions between the nature of the individual and the restrictions of society.

The following year, he was invited to join the Duke of Saxony-Weimar at court.  At first, he was just an "ornament" there, but later he performed various real political duties, including inspections of mines and the establishment of weather observatories.

In 1782, he was inducted into the nobility, which permitted him to add "von" to his name.  Because of his fame and status in Weimar, he met and befriended a number of young poets, including Schiller and Herder.

Since his teens, Goethe was given to falling in love, yet apparently unable to commit himself to one woman or the institution of marriage.  His longest and most intense relationship began around 1775 with Charlotte von Schardt, a married woman who had had seven children (though only four survived).  He would write long and romantic letters to her for most of his life.

He did eventually set up a household with a young working-class girl named Christiane Vulpius.  She bore a child on Christmas day in 1789.

In 1801, Goethe became quite ill, and his recovery took many years.  Toward the end of his illness, Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena and marched into Weimar.  His troops attempted to take over Goethe's house, and Christiane physically protected him.  He finally married her.

Goethe was a strong admirer of Napoleon, and visited him in 1808 at the emperor's invitation. Goethe also visited with Beethoven in 1812.

Goethe's greatest work is his two-part play Faust.  Although he began writing it in 1773, it would not be finished until 1831.  The first part, however, could stand alone, and it was completed in 1808.  Its theme was human freedom and the power of passion, which Faust discovers after he wagers his soul in a devil's bargain with  Mephistopheles.

[An interesting aside:  Goethe's Faust creates an artificial man in his laboratory.  This influenced a certain Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (perhaps the first science fiction novel).  She even places her story in a 13th century castle she had seen which belonged to the old (and colorful) German family Frankenstein, a castle Goethe was also quite familiar with!]

In addition to his poetry, novels, and plays, Goethe spent considerable time on science.  He studied medicine, anatomy, physics, chemistry, botany, and meteorology.

In 1792, he completed the two part Beiträge zur Optik (Contributions to Optics), and in 1810 the three part Zur Farbenlehre (On the Theory of Colors).  He truly believed that it was these works that would be his greatest contributions.  Instead, few scientists approved of them, and they were to make little serious impact on the field.  His work would make an impression on various artists, though, including Turner, Klee, and Kandinsky.  His approach was really more phenomenological than experimental, and his work reflected more on the subjective experiences of color and light than on their physics.

He also wrote a book called The Metamorphosis of Plants, which suggested that all plants are just variations on a primitive plant he called the Urpflanze.  He coined the term morphology along the way, and showed the relationship of human beings to animals with his discovery of the human intermaxillary bone (just above your upper teeth), just where it is in lower animals.

His wife Christiane died in 1816.  His lifelong love Charlotte died in 1827.  The Duke died the following year.  And his last remaining child died in 1830.  Suffering from sickness and depression, Goethe himself finally died, March 22, 1832, one year after finishing the second half of his masterpiece Faust.