Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
    Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
    Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
    Audiobook24 hours

    Goethe: Life as a Work of Art

    Written by Rüdiger Safranksi

    Narrated by James Anderson Foster

    5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    This sterling biography of Germany's greatest writer presents Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as if we are seeing him for the first time.

    The work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has reverberated through two and a half centuries, altering the course of literature in ways both grand and intimate. No other writer so completely captivated the intellectual life of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, putting into language the anxieties and ambitions of a civilization on the cusp of modernity. A literary celebrity by the age of twenty-five, Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt in 1749, attracted the adulation and respect of the greatest scientists, politicians, composers, and philosophers of his day. Schoolboys dressed like his fictional characters. Napoleon read his first novel obsessively. He was an astoundingly prolific writer, a master of many genres, from poetry to scientific treatises, from novels like the tragic Sorrows of Young Werther to dramatic works like Faust. Indeed, Goethe's unparalleled literary output would come to define the Romantic age.

    Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is the first definitive biography in a generation to tell the larger-than-life story of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Drawing upon the trove of letters, diaries, and notebooks Goethe left behind, as well as correspondence and criticism from Goethe's contemporaries, Safranski weaves a rich tale of Europe in the throes of revolution and of the man whose ideas heralded a new era.

    Safranski's monumental biography is a careful survey of Goethe's wide-ranging genius. Beyond his incredible literary gifts, Goethe was intensely interested in natural science and took seriously his official post as a statesman, working tirelessly to ensure that the working poor received wages and daily bread. With grace and nuance, Safranski crafts a portrait of Goethe's inner life that illuminates both his written work and the turmoil and triumphs of his era. Safranski shows that reading Goethe affords not simply an encounter with a literary virtuoso but an opportunity to develop a deeper appreciation of the human condition.

    Goethe was writing in the midst of a dramatic and bloody time for Europe: the revolutions in France and America overturned the old regimes and introduced new ways of thinking about the world. Set against this backdrop, Goethe's life and work serve as an essential touchstone for the birth of the modern age. But as Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe's greatest creation was not only his literary masterpieces but his very life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    TranslatorDavid Dollenmayer
    Release dateDec 25, 2018
    ISBN9781541444393
    Goethe: Life as a Work of Art

    Related to Goethe

    Related audiobooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Isolation vs. Solitude

      Oct 23, 2018

      Isolation vs. Solitude
      1 min read

    • Article

      Enigma From the East

      Dec 3, 2018

      Enigma From the East
      4 min read

    • Article

      True Romantic

      Apr 2, 2020

      True Romantic
      3 min read

    • Article

      Harold Bloom’s Immortality

      Oct 16, 2019

      Harold Bloom’s Immortality
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mozart’s Music As He Would Have Known It

      Oct 4, 2022

      Complete Piano Sonatas Robert Levin (fortepiano)  ECM ECM 2710-16 377:11 mins (7 discs) Robert Levin, fortepianist, professor emeritus at Harvard and much more besides, is one of few people who have ever been granted access to play Mozart’s own forte

      3 min read

    • Article

      Devil’s Advocate

      Jan 26, 2023

      Devil’s Advocate
      9 min read

    • Article

      Blood, Shit, and Sex

      Mar 22, 2019

      Blood, Shit, and Sex
      8 min read

    • Article

      Obsession Is Universal

      Apr 19, 2018

      Is there art without obsession? Obsession is endemic to the human condition.  It drives creation like sunlight nourishes plants. If artists are observers of human follies and failings, then depicting obsession comes with the terrain.  Three recently

      6 min read

    • Article

      Reconstructing A Self-destructive Life

      Oct 27, 2022

      JOSEPH ROTH LIVED HIS LIFE on the peripheries and between the gaps of European civilisation. He was born in Brody, now in Ukraine but then a shtetl at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He yearned to escape west to Vienna, where he

      4 min read

    • Article

      Their Lives Go On Until They Don’t: The Trouble with Refugee Novels

      Jan 28, 2019

      If art is in one sense the processing of reality, how can an artist hope to process that which, in all its horror and incoherence, resists interpretation? The post Their Lives Go On Until They Don’t: The Trouble with Refugee Novels appeared first on

      8 min read

    • Article

      No Pain, No Gain

      Jul 12, 2023

      No Pain, No Gain
      5 min read

    • Article

      In The Middle Of Even This: Poetry

      Jan 1, 2020

      To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:against the grid of the quilt, her hand seemsstitched to the cuff of its sleeve—although he wantsmost urgently the hand to stroke his head,a

      7 min read

    • Article

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell

      Jun 21, 2018

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell
      4 min read

    • Article

      Jena-gadda-da-vida

      Sep 1, 2022

      For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of th

      4 min read

    • Article

      Paint It Black

      Sep 29, 2023

      Members of subcultures can suffer for their allegiance, few more so than goths. The 2007 murder of Sophie Lancaster, targeted by teenagers because of her clothes and hairstyle, was an appalling example. Thankfully, the response is more often one of s

      2 min read

    • Article

      39 Casts of Delays

      May 3, 2021

      39 Casts of Delays
      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Goethe

    5/5

    8 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Simply fantastic! Safranski presents Goethe’s life tracing his motive to live.