Goethe : Life As a Work of Art. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Goethe : Life As a Work of Art

Goethe (1749 - 1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and, as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasises, a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but also the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethes entire oeuvre, relying on primary sources as well as Goethes correspondence with contemporaries and their comments to one another, to produce an illuminating portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Set against the cultural and political turmoil of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goethe, who intersected with almost every great figure of his age, is thrillingly re-created in this monumental biography. As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethes greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.

Rüdiger Safranski is a German philosopher and writer, and the author of biographies of Friedrich Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. He lives in Berlin.

David Dollenmayer lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and translates German fiction and nonfiction.