Goethe Etc.

I am sure I have mentioned over the years that Goethe pops up in the most surprising places.

Faust and Gretchen It has been too long since I have posted.

Some of my readers may have been wondering about my long silence.

It's been a while, as I have been working away at my Goethe book.

Even in his letters from I call his “apprentice years,” from 1768 to 1775, there are few moments in which Goethe informs us (or his addressee) of what is going on is his surroundings or of what is happening around him at a given moment.

The title above is the subject of the book I am writing on Goethe, and the work itself explains my long blog silence.

Portrait of Goethe, ca. 1764 It’s been too long since I have posted.

This post is going to be all over the place.

I subscribe to the TLS, which does pretty good coverage of German literature and history, including Goethe.

As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo, which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication.

This is the concluding part of the previous post on the subject of refugees and émigrés during the French Revolution in Goethe's works.

Unterhaltungen dt.

Goethe's Clavigo Clavigo and Marie meet after a long absence Lots of things have been going on since my last blogpost that have kept me from posting regularly, even though what has kept me occupied has concerned Goethe.

The Blue Flower My previous post was all over the place.

Jena 1779 The “story” — for it is a story that will be told — opens with a scene in the parlor of a house in the university town of Jena.

Goethe was never actually in Copenhagen, certainly not in 1932, but it shows the extent of his reach and influence and the general knowledge of his works that a parody on his play Faust was performed in the city in 1932, and by some very smart people at t…

The previous post discussed Goethe's travels in the summer of 1774.

Sometimes it is necessary to lift your eyes from the written words and try to see what Goethe saw.

As I wrote in my previous post, 1932 marked the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s death, with commemorations organized worldwide.

A “true” socialist, I have learned, is a humanist.

I am currently involved in de-cluttering my apartment.

Brad Pitt as Achilles In the previous post, concerning the pastoral genre, I sought to convey how much Goethe drew on traditional poetic genres in his poetry and dramas, but which he "modified" in such a way as to create something new poetically.

I am back in New York City after three months on a small island adjacent to Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island.

No, Goethe fans, this post will not be about Goethe's love life, although there is much to be said in that connection.

Yes, August 29 has rolled around again.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned this summer to concentrate on Goethe’s pre-Weimar writings, having brought with me Karl Eibl’s two-volume edition of Der junge Goethe.

Consider the following a book review of a very small volume (47 pp.) of translations of poems by Goethe entitled Nightwalker’s Song.