Goethe

A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and - as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasizes - a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethe s entire oeuvre, relying exclusively on primary sources, including his correspondence with contemporaries, to produce a fresh and authentic (Economist) portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Skillfully blending artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings of the great political and intellectual figures Goethe encountered, [Safranski s] portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy of a monumental legacy (The New Yorker). As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe s greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.

Here, Rüdiger Safranski sets his sights on the writer considered the Shakespeare of German literature. Goethe (1749-1832) awakened a burgeoning German nation and the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski scoured Goethe's oeuvre, relying on primary sources as well as his correspondence with contemporaries and their comments to one another, to produce an illuminating portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Set against the cultural and political turmoil of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goethe, who intersected with almost every great figure of his age, is thrillingly re-created here. As Safranski shows, Goethe's greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.