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Young Goethe: The Young Goethe. Goethe was born on Aug. 28, 1749, in the free city of Frankfurt. His father, Johann Caspar Goethe, a lawyer, carefully supervised his children's education. His mother, Catharina Elisabeth Textor Goethe, was a direct descendant of the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. Goethe's studies included music and drawing, and he took great interest in the work of artists patronized by his father and by a French officer billeted with the family during the occupation of Frankfurt, from 1759 to 1763.
Goethe died in Weimar on March 22, 1832. After a state funeral, his coffin was placed beside that of Schiller in the mausoleum of the ducal family. Goethe's later years are especially well recorded in his conversations, of which those with Johann Peter Eckermann are the best known. Other conversations were used by Thomas Mann in his novel The Beloved Returns (1939), which is a detailed portrait of Goethe in 1816.
Few lives have been as full as Goethe's, and because he became famous as a young man and was always personally attractive, few lives are more fully documented. Even his early letters were preserved, and still earlier conversations remembered and recorded, supplementing the often detailed information of his autobiographical writings. Much of his work mirrors personal experience as well as a continuous intellectual development. Although what is known about Goethe is so complex as to permit widely divergent evaluations of his personality and his accomplishments, it testifies to a life of tremendous total achievement and of unique historical significance.
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