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By GEORGE BOEHMER
.c The Associated Press

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - Germans crowded into Frankfurt and Weimar by the thousands Saturday to celebrate the 250th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the nation's world renowned poet.

Dozens of men dressed in black-tailed suits and cylinder hats and women in the costumes of Goethe's time strolled in the streets around Frankfurt's Alte Oper, the city's opera house where Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder presented the Goethe prize to 73-year-old German author Siegfried Lenz.

Frankfurt Mayor Petra Roth praised Lenz for his approach to German history, saying his best known work, ``German Lesson,'' published in 1968, describes everyday life under the Nazis and ``the banality of evil.''

Accepting the prize, Lenz called Goethe a ``prince of poets, who is and will remain classical.''

Past recipients of the $26,840 Goethe Prize include Albert Schweitzer, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud.

Festivities in the city where Goethe was born on Aug. 28, 1749, also included a showing of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's 1926 silent film ``Faust'' - based on Goethe's dramatic poem about a man who makes a pact with the devil for universal knowledge.

More than 550 artists were in Frankfurt taking part in various skits about Goethe, some on a large stage set up outside the neo-classic opera house where a crowd of several thousand jammed the square under a sunny sky to watch.

In the central city of Weimar, where Goethe lived and wrote most of his works from 1775 until his death in 1832, a full day of festivities included readings, period music and a street festival in its picturesque cobblestone squares and streets.

On Sunday, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and German musicians plan to perform a joint gala concert in a Weimar park where Goethe once gathered with other intellectuals.

That performance, in a token of remembrance and reconciliation, comes despite the dark shadow of the Nazis' former Buchenwald concentration camp in a beech forest up the hill from Weimar, where 56,000 inmates died from 1937 to 1945.

It was in that same forest that Goethe often strolled and gathered inspiration for his works, which Germans now proudly celebrate as the positive side of their nation torn asunder by two world wars and the horrors of the Holocaust.