The greatest German poet and his world: Thomas Steinfeld's engaging biography for Goethe's 275th birthday
When Goethe died in 1832, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and industrialization had fundamentally transformed Europe. Thomas Steinfeld reimagines Goethe as a person whose life and work uniquely reflect the upheavals of that time: from his childhood in Frankfurt and his years of study in Leipzig and Strasbourg, through the phase of poetic awakening to Faust, Farbenlehre and the West-östlicher Divan. The Duchy of Saxe-Weimar also comes into a new light as an intellectual landscape of great significance for philosophy, medicine, and physics.
Goethe assumes his familiar roles as a poet, theatermaker, and traveler, but also the less-known ones of a politician, war observer, and naturalist. Steinfeld paints the picture of an intellectual who could not write without simultaneously thinking the opposite, a conservative who was always ahead of his time – and a smart, curious, yet lonely individual who wrote some of the most beautiful and profound works in German literature.
"An entertaining, brilliantly written book. An educational journey and a sensory delight." Zeit Online on Italien
