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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Main Page | an Impressive Goethe Poetry Sampler | Thought Provoking Quotes by Goethe | Goethe : One of the Giants of World Literature | Goethe's Extremely Happy Childhood | Literary and Social Duties -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Goethe Takes Refuge in Nature | Goethe's Relation to the Romantics | Mr. Goethe's Epistolary Style, Social Conduct | Goethe's Introspection and Religious Mysticism | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Books and Reviews | Katharena's Essential Goethe, Ground Zero!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came of middle-class stock, the Bürgertum that he never ceased to praise as a breeding ground of the finest culture. His father, Johann Kaspar Goethe, was of north German extraction. A retired lawyer, he was able to lead a life of cultured leisure, travelling in Italy and amassing a well-stocked library and picture gallery in his handsomely furnished house. Goethe's mother, Katharine Elisabeth Textor, was the daughter of a Bürgermeister (mayor) of Frankfurt; she opened up to her son valued connections with the patriciate of the free city. Thus even in his heredity Goethe unites those opposing tendencies that have always prevailed in German lands: the intellectual and moral rigour of the north and the easygoing artistic sensuousness of the south. Of eight children, only Wolfgang, the firstborn, and his sister, Cornelia, survived. In his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth”), Goethe left an unforgettable picture of a happy childhood. Here are set out with acute psychological insight the emotional complexities of his bond with Cornelia, which found expression in numerous portrayals of the brother–sister relationship in his works; his passionate attachment to a barmaid, Gretchen, which foreshadowed the rejection pattern of many of his loves; the broadening of outlook that came with French occupation during the Seven Years' War; the coronation of Joseph II in the Frankfurt Römer, with its indelible impressions of medieval pageantry; and the fervent religiosity of Pietistic circles, which led him to declaim F.G. Klopstock's Messias (“Messiah”) as a kind of Lenten exercise, to write a prose epic on Joseph and a poem on Christ's descent into hell. The French army had brought its own troupe of actors, and their performances intensified a passion for the stage, first kindled in him by his grandmother's gift of a puppet theatre, and inspired a lifelong devotion to Racine. A love of things English was fostered by friendship with a young clothier from Leeds (Goethe's paternal grandfather was a fashionable tailor) with whom Cornelia, seeing herself as the heroine of a Richardsonian novel, fell hopelessly in love. Wolfgang's reaction was the inception of a novel in letters, a kind of linguistic exercise in which four brothers correspond in different languages. --Encyclopedia Britannica