Goethe : Life As a Work of Art. This item is unavailable.Goethe : Life As a Work of Art

"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.

Rudiger Safranskiis a German philosopher and writer, and the author of biographies on Friedrich Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He lives in Berlin.