Goethe's Garden House

Setting of Goethe's Garden House (click to enlarge)

The diary entries of winter and spring 1777 concerning the garden house, the mention of workmen and further work on the roof, got me interested in exploring it. According to Nicholas Boyle, Goethe took possession of the two-storied cottage in April 1776. More or less a ruin, it required several months of repair before it was habitable. Boyle writes that the duke employed up to 26 workmen at a time, repairing roof and floors, painting walls, clearing the garden, while court carpenter Johann Martin Mieding constructed furniture: a 3-part pine dining table and two beds, one for Goethe, the other for Seidel. Boyle speaks of the hut as allowing Goethe to live out “Werther’s fantasy of the simple life at a symbolic, but not inconvenient, distance from the town,” where he spent half his time and also had an emergency apartment for his use. Goethe’s diaries of early 1777

Wolfgang Vulpius (1897–1978) has a take on Goethe's early years in Weimar that throws a different light on the garden house. Vulpius, a  literary scholar and writer, was a descendent of Christian August Vulpius, brother of Christiana. Wolfgang published in 1955 — thus, when Weimar was still in the DDR — Goethe in Thüringen: Stätten seines Lebens und Wirkens, which I have in my possession. He touches on practically every place in Thuringia that Goethe visited or in which he left some trace of himself, not only the big names (Erfurt, Gotha, Ilmenau), but also places unfamiliar to me (Paulinzella, Pößneck, Kötschau).

According to Goethe In Thüringen, biographies of Goethe dwell on the court life and the literary pursuits but shortchange the effect of the “new world” that Weimar revealed to him, “eine grenzenlos weite, unerschöplich reiche: die Natur.” According to Vulpius, before Weimar Goethe’s acquaintance with the world of “natural produce” (Naturerzeugnisse) consisted of table fruit (Tafelobst) and ornamental gardens. Vulpius drew my attention to “Die Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums” of 1817 in Goethe’s morphological writings, which opens as follows:

Sogleich bei meinem Eintritt in den edlen weimarischen Lebenskreis ward mir der unschätzbare Gewinn zuteil, Stuben- und Stadtluft mit Land-, Wald- und Gartenatmosphäre zu vertauschen.

Goethe continues in the opening paragraph to mention that in his first winter in Weimar, while partaking in the pleasures of the chase and hunt, activities that most of us are familiar with, he had many conversations with foresters about “Holzkultur.” In the rest of the text he gives credit to the many individuals who imparted botanical instruction: Dr. Buchholz (“Inhaber der Stadtapotheke am Markt”), Johann Friedrich August Göttling, Johann Georg Karl Batsch, Friedrich Gottlieb Dietrich. The basis of botanical knowledge was Linnaean, and it was the young Friedrich Gottlieb who explained the Linnaean classification to him, while Linnaeus’ Philosophy of Botany became his daily study. It is here that Goethe writes that the greatest influence on him, after Spinoza and Shakespeare, was Linnaeus.

Already in 1776, according to Boyle, Goethe planted lime trees, and in 1777 oaks and beeches, spruce and Juniper. Jasmine, honeysuckle, and climbing roses soon decorated the place, and before long he was sending fresh vegetable from his garden to Frau von Stein. It strikes me that Goethe was not simply living Werther’s fantasy of the simple life, but was making a home for himself in a very un-Werther kind of way.

The very cool images here (click to enlarge) come from Weimars Stadtbild 1784-1828-1900 (Mit den Strassennamen und einen Stadtplan zur Zeit von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) by Guido Schnaubert.