Goethe House
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Main]] was the family residence of the Goethe family, most notably Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, until 1795. Johann Wolfgang was himself born here in 1749 to his parents, Johann Caspar Goethe, a lawyer, and Katherine Elisabeth Textor, daughter of the mayor (Bürgermeister) of Frankfurt. Johann Wolfgang lived here along with his sister Cornelia until 1765, aged sixteen, when he moved to Leipzig to study law, returning sporadically thereafter. Goethe subsequently wrote about his childhood spent here in his autobiography Aus Meiner Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, (Out of my Life: Poetry and Truth), (1811–1833), and describing his birth thus:
- "On the 28th of August, 1749, at mid-day, as the clock struck twelve, I came into the world, at Frankfurt-am-Main. My horoscope was propitious: the sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and Venus looked on him with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more, as she had then reached her planetary hour.
- She opposed herself, therefore, to my birth, which could not be accomplished until this hour was passed."
Showing a prodigious intellect and talent from an early age, Goethe wrote Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and his first substantially acknowledged novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) here as well as laying the foundations for his celebrated interpretation of Faust. Today, the visitor can see the study with its writing desk as it would have been used by Goethe to pen these early works.
