When the city was plundered by French soldiers, the Frauenplan house was also threatened: Christiane vigorously opposed invading soldiers and was able to stop the plundering until Goethe had achieved official protection by the French commander. It was probably the insecurity of life at this time which led him to marry the mother of his son, with whom he had been living for seventeen years — or rather, should we say, the sense of insecurity led her to consent to the marriage, which she had before refused.
They married a few days later at the Jakobskirche in Weimar. In order to change the social rejection of his wife, Goethe asked the wealthy widow Johanna Schopenhauer , mother of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer ,[3] to break through the barrier with an official invitation to tea.
She was always treated as a wife, and very much better than most wives, the two being united by bonds more indissoluble than those of the church.
Christiane loved the theatre. She visited plays in Weimar as well as in other places. In she suffered a stroke. The following year she suffered severe pain and kidney failure. After a week of agonizing suffering, she died on 6 June For a long time the location of her grave was unknown, but after researching old documents the location was rediscovered and a new stone was placed there. At yovisto academic video search you can learn more about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the lecture given by Dr.
References and further Reading:. Christiane Vulpius, drawn by Goethe. Werther, on the other hand, is never ready for action, because he has no momentous deed waiting to be performed. In this, he is a more modern figure than Hamlet, who, after all, was summoned by a ghost. Werther, like us, gets no help from the other world in directing his steps in this one.
In fact, the book became scandalous for its resemblance to real people and events. The crucial difference between Goethe and his creation was that the poet found a way out of his labyrinth. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe finished none of the major literary projects he had in hand—he was too busy with paperwork. Instead of remaining focussed on his own passions and desires, he subdued his mind to the discipline of the objective, of work and responsibility.
He turned toward objectivity in other ways as well, particularly in his study of science. But, while he failed to overthrow the Newtonian understanding of optics, Goethe found in science a necessary distraction from self. At the same time, he developed a conception of nature that provided an alternative to the mathematical and spiritless mechanism that the Enlightenment seemed to offer. 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. In , in a spirit of adventure characteristic more of a young poet than of a middle-aged civil servant, Goethe abruptly threw aside his work and left Weimar without telling friends and colleagues where he was going.
He was thirty-seven. As a worshipper of the classical world and of Renaissance painting, Goethe found Italy—especially Rome, where he spent most of his time—to be a revelation and a rebirth. Instead, he focusses on the sights themselves—geological features of the country, garbage-disposal methods in the cities, a court trial, a theatrical performance. Still, there is no missing the fact that this was a time of reawakening for the poet—spiritually and also sensually.
As a young man, Goethe fell in love regularly; biographers define the periods of his life by the women who presided over them and the literary works they inspired. Partly, this was because Goethe took care to steer clear of anything that would commit him to marriage, which he assiduously avoided for as long as he could.
Later, at the court of Weimar, the poet engaged in a very intense, decade-long but apparently nonsexual relationship with a married woman, Charlotte von Stein.
Things were different in Rome, where Goethe had a liaison, frankly sexual this time, with a Roman widow whose name is not known. This newly liberated erotic spirit trailed him back to Weimar, where, soon after his return, he met and moved in with Christiane Vulpius, a woman so much his inferior in education and social status that marriage seemed out of the question. He did eventually marry her, but not until almost twenty years later, in , by which time she had already borne him a son.
Such lengthy gestation gives both books a loosely woven, episodic quality. For Thomas Mann, whose admiration of Goethe took the form of spiritual imitation, Goethe was above all an educator, but one who had first to learn, through experience, the wisdom he taught.
Literally speaking, Wilhelm, a bourgeois young man with artistic inclinations, apprentices himself to a touring theatre company, where he learns how to act and direct.
Goethe writes with affection about the wide-open world of the actor, which is full of escapades and love affairs, bed tricks and impersonations. Indeed, so many scandalous things happen in the novel—from adultery and illegitimacy to arson, incest, and suicide—that it often feels more like a gothic parody than like an earnest Bildungsroman.
He loved the landscape and made lots of sketches , and he read the ancient poets and books on the history of art. He wrote a play in rhyme called Iphigenie auf Tauris which combines the beauty of Classicism with great poetry.
Goethe died in Weimar on March 22, He had started as a great Classical writer of the 18th century and finished as a young Romantic of the 19th century. No one else had such a big influence on art and literature of that time.
Goethe, age 38, painted by Angelica Kauffman A Goethe watercolour depicting a liberty pole at the border to the short-lived Republic of Mainz, created under influence of the French Revolution and destroyed in the Siege of Mainz in which Goethe participated. Goethe—Schiller Monument , Weimar Statue dedicated to Goethe in Chicago's Lincoln Park Quick facts for kids. Christiane Vulpius m. All content from Kiddle encyclopedia articles including the article images and facts can be freely used under Attribution-ShareAlike license, unless stated otherwise.
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