Few names in history manage to encapsulate an entire era. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is one of them.
He is not only the greatest pride of literary Germany, but also one of the greatest monuments of modern European thought. Poet, playwright, novelist, philosopher, scientist, politician Goethe was everything a man of the late Renaissance could imagine himself to be. A light that illuminated the 28th century and left behind an echo that cannot be extinguished. He was born on August 1749, 25 in Frankfurt am Main, into a wealthy bourgeois family, where classical education was essential. From an early age he was a child of rapid absorption, reading, writing, painting, reciting. At the age of XNUMX he published “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, a novel that in a few years would turn Europe into a storm of feelings.
The “Werther effect” would become a social phenomenon, with young people dressing like Werther, talking like him, and even dying like him. But Goethe’s life was not simply a tale of sentiment. He entered the service of the Duke of Weimar, where he spent most of his life.
As a minister, diplomat and reformer, he became an irreplaceable figure for German culture. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he was writing one of the greatest works of world literature, “Faust”. A drama that took him more than 60 years of his life and which remains a symbol of the clash between spirit and knowledge, light and darkness, God and the Devil. Goethe was also a deep thinker. He did not see literature as an end in itself, but as a means to understand the world. His studies on colors (where he challenged Newton), his travels in Italy, his interests in botany and anatomy, testify to a universalist spirit. A man of reason and feeling, of measurement and the inexplicable. He also created the terms “World Literature” (Weltliteratur), anticipating cultural globalization long before it happened. At a time when nationalism was growing in Europe, Goethe remained a cosmopolitan, who saw unity in diversity.
“He who knows only his own country, does not know his own country,” he wrote. He lived for 82 years and died in 1832, with the words “Mehr Licht!” (“More light!”). These two words, the last on his lips, have become a testament to his entire life and work, the search for light, knowledge, the human spirit. Goethe is not just a writer to be read, but a mind to be known, in order to better understand oneself, Europe and humanism. At a time when thought is often degraded to slogans, returning to Goethe is a return to depth. In the time of immediate rudeness, he teaches us the patience of form. In the time of social networks, he reminds us that man is more than the next opinion.
