Goethe – On End and Beginning

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the great poet, confronts the finitude of life in a creative way: Death »always gets its turn, annoys us and yet drives us to strive in earnest once more,« he wrote to Zelter in March 1827. Goethe experiences loss, of his sister and his mother, of Christiane, Schiller and the Duke, for instance, as critical caesuras, but his respective acknowledgements always combine personal sympathy and literary composition with a certain confidence. His credo »The happiest person is the one who can connect the end of his life with the beginning« shows the great poet as a serious as well as encouraging partner in the conversation about a very human basic experience.