Why is Goethe so important?
Why is Goethe so important?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the most important German literary figure of modern times and is often compared to Shakespeare and Dante. He was a poet, dramatist, director, novelist, scientist, critic, artist and statesman during what was known as the Romantic period of European arts.
What did Goethe believe?
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" ...
What did Goethe say about love?
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. We don't get to know anything but what we love. Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.
Was Goethe a genius?
Johann Wolfgang Goethe was a universal genius, one of those talents whose works transcend race, nation, language-and even time. Like Homer, Mozart and Shakespeare, Goethe is a part of the history of human culture. ... It is also full of exhaustive examinations of the works Goethe produced up to 1790.
What literary periods did Goethe write in?
In the literary culture of the German-speaking countries, he has had so dominant a position that, since the end of the 18th century, his writings have been described as “classical.” In a European perspective he appears as the central and unsurpassed representative of the Romantic movement, broadly understood.
How do you pronounce Goethe?
The Goethe pronunciation is “Gur-ta." Outside of Germans, five-time Jeopardy champions, and bus drivers, few locals actually know how to pronounce Goethe.
Was Goethe a pagan?
In this way, science performed something like the office of religion, turning Goethe into a kind of modern, rational pagan. Ten years of office work, of literary projects left incomplete, finally took their toll.
Why did Goethe go to Italy?
Other reasons include his life-long dream to see Italy and the slow accretion of frustrations in office. Goethe's dissatisfaction with his life in office becomes a valid reason as to why Goethe would choose to leave Weimar so suddenly, as seen in his urgent journal entry dated the 3rd of September 1786.
Is Goethe a polymath?
The paradigm under which Goethe might be classified a philosopher is much older, recalling the ancient and then renaissance conception of the polymath, the man of great learning and wisdom, whose active life serves as the outward expression of his thinking. ...
Which work is associated with Goethe?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is perhaps best known for The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the first novel of the Sturm und Drang movement, and for Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832), a play about a man who sells his soul to the Devil that is sometimes considered Germany's greatest contribution to world literature.
