Goethe: Life as a Work of Art - Softcover

Rüdiger Safranski; David Dollenmayer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1631494899 ISBN 13: 9781631494895

Publisher: Liveright, 2019

Synopsis

"Safranski has written an outstanding biography, one that can be enjoyed by both scholars and general readers...Like Napoleon with his generals, Goethe has been lucky, on this occasion, with both his biographer and his translator. A compelling life has found compelling form." Literary Review

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' 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.

About this title

About the Author

Rudiger Safranski is a German philosopher and writer, and the author of biographies of Friedrich Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. He lives in Berlin. David Dollenmayer lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and translates German fiction and nonfiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1631494899
• ISBN 13: 9781631494895
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 688