Conversations of Goethe
German poet, dramatist, novelist, translator, scientist and musician, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a master of world literature, the author of "The Sorrows of Young Werther", "Wilhelm Meister" and "Faust". Nowhere else can one encounter a more penetrating, many-sided and personal Goethe than in the extraordinary "Conversations" (1836) by Johann Peter Eckermann (1792-1854), a German author and scholar as well as Goethe's friend, archivist and editor. This text presents Goethe's thoughts on Byron, Carlyle, Delacroix, Hegel, Shakespeare and Voltaire, as well as his views on art, architecture, astronomy, the Bible, Chinese literature, criticism, dreams, ethics, freedom, genius, imagination, immortality, love, mind over body, and sculpture.
A friend between the covers. .
I love Goethe's creative works and his scientific theories, but most of all I love this book. I travel with it, look in it for advice and conversation. As an artist Goethe was incomparable; as a scientist he was curious, alive, observant, questioning -- but as a man who lived a life with a conscious intention to make his life a work of his own mind and heart he is the master and that master is found in the pages of this book. When I need a wise friend, I turn here and find, beside the wisdom, a silly person who thought spectacles were an affectation, an attempt on the part of someone to be something he was not. . . --Reviewer: Martha A Kennedy from San Diego, CA
A Relatively Unknown, Yet Great Book
While in graduate school in Australia I happened in a pub (which is not extraordinary in itself) and got to talking with the bar-tender. It turns out that he was a student at the Univ. of Queensland too and was getting his MA in German. I told him how much I enjoyed Nietzche, who was the focus of his thesis, and eventually we got around to Eckermann's Coversations. I told him it was one of the best books that I had ever read: so quaint and yet probing. The reader sits in the drawing room and hears the most extrodinary discussions. In this way it reminds me of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. It is so civilized that it is almost nostalgic--but far too potent for that due to the genuis involved (Eckermann's mind ain't to shabby either). The newly made friend expressed amazement that an English major happened on this book; he said that I had been the only person outside the German dept that he had met that had ever read the book, or even heard of it (and this in a much more literate country than here). This is truely a shame we agreed. Ease-drop on a better time when scholars were gentleman, and in search of the truth not some PC BS, and were enamored with ideas. Goethe's Maxims is also highly recommended--as Faust and his other better known works. A Western classic, like the subject. --Reviewer: banks from Branchville, SC USA
