Goethe biography 2013 calendar 2017

The adage, often apocryphally attributed to Churchill, about age and political disposition may actually have originated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Johnson laments the fact that Goethe is no longer required material for German students. Apparently he has suffered the same fate at the hands of post-modern sensibilities that Shakespeare or Chaucer have in English-speaking universities.

There is added irony in that Goethe began his intellectual life as a romanticist and freethinker who never entirely accommodated himself to Christian orthodoxy ; nevertheless, his increasingly conservative political opinions were shaped by the fact that he had witnessed the excesses of the French Revolution, the imperialism of Napoleon and the subsequent emergence of intolerant ideological movements.

Goethe biography 2013 calendar 2017: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There was plenty of gray area in the moral realm. He lived with a woman, Christiane Vulpius, for 18 years before finally marrying her, and conducted numerous intimate liaisons with other women. Some of his writings were overtly erotic for their time. According to the German sage:. Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks.

You never hear so much talk about freedom as when one party wants to subjugate another and aims at nothing less than shifting power, influence, and treasure from one hand to another. That doctrine seems to me quite impracticable and would never work. It contradicts all nature, all experience, and the course of things for thousands of years.