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Exzellenz Geheimrat

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe in 1828, by Joseph Karl Stieler
Goethe in 1828, by Joseph Karl Stieler
BornJohann Wolfgang Goethe
28 August 1749
Free Imperial City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire
Died22 March 1832 (aged 82)
Weimar, Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Confederation
OccupationPoet, novelist, playwright, natural philosopher, diplomat, civil servant
Alma mater
Literary movement
Notable works
Spouse
(m. 1806; died 1816)
Children5 (4 died young), including August von Goethe
ParentsKatharina Elisabeth Goethe (mother)
RelativesCornelia Schlosser (sister)
Christian August Vulpius (brother-in-law)
Johann Georg Schlosser (brother-in-law)
Ottilie von Goethe (daughter-in-law)
Walther von Goethe (grandson)
Signature

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature and aesthetic criticism, and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. He is considered to be the greatest German literary figure of the modern era.

Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, in 1782. He was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke's privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.

Goethe's first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. In 1791 he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written, while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six "representative men" in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1836).

Life