Cornelia Goethe

On this date in 1777 Goethe received news of the death of his sister Cornelia the previous week, on June 8, four weeks after the death of her second child. His diary entry concerning the news is brief, with "zurück" referring to his return to Weimar from Kochberg, the von Stein estate:

früh zurück. Brief des Todts m. Schwester. Dunckler zerrissener Tag.

One assumes that he related the news to the duke, but the only document concerning his immediate reaction, a letter to Charlotte von Stein on the same day, is terse:

Um achte war ich in meinem Garten fand alles gut und wohl und ging mit mir selbst, mit unter lesend auf und ab. Um neune kriegt ich Brief dass meine Schwester todt sey. -- Ich kann nun weiter nichts sagen.

Every study I have seen of Goethe's sister stresses the close relationship between Cornelia and Wolfgang, who was one year older. (There had been another brother who survived early childhood, but only to the age of seven.) They were both educated at home, having many of the same lessons and teachers. His letters to her from Leipzig, where he enrolled as a student at the age of sixteen, reflect the bookish atmosphere in which they were raised. These letters display the pedagogical bent that was lifelong. As the elder sibling, he is always instructing her, especially on how to write a proper letter. This instruction itself reflects what he was learning at the time, as he attended the classes of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, who besides being one of the most popular German writers of the 18th century, penned a letter-writing style manual: Briefe, nebst einer praktischen Abhandlung von dem guten Geschmacke in Briefen (Letters, together with a practical treatise on good taste in letters, 1751). Letter-writing was an absorbing interest in the 18th century, as can be seen in the epistolary novels of Richardson and Rousseau. Germans learned from these writers, and carried on the tradition, with Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther being one of the most exemplary.

Goethe himself, however, rarely displayed such an outpouring of personal emotion in his letters. We know of the effect on him of grief, in the case of Cornelia's death, by what he did not put into words. A further diary entry, the next day, is very succinct: "Leiden und Träumen." That says it all, but he did write to his mother later in the month, in which he writes of the way that the good fortune he is currently enjoying in Weimar makes Cornelia's death more painful. And then a very interesting observation concerning the difference between recovery from physical pain and from grief:

Ich kan nur menschlich fühlen, und lasse mich der Natur die uns heftigen Schmerz nur kurze Zeit, trauer lang empfinden lässt.

A longer letter to his mother in November contains a beautiful, image-rich passage describing his relationship to his sister (and below it my paltry translation):

Mir ists als wenn in der Herbstzeit ein Baum gepflanzt würde, Gott gebe seinen Seegen dazu, dass wir dereinst drunter sizzen Schatten und Früchte haben mögen. Mit meiner Schwester ist mir so eine starcke Wurzel die mich an der Erde hielt abgehauen worden dass die Äste, von oben, die davon Nahrung hatten auch absterben mussen.

(It seems to me as if in autumn a tree had been planted, to which God gave his blessing so that we might one day sit in its shadows and have fruit from it. With my sister, it is as if a strong root that held me to the earth has been torn up, so that the branches above above that had their nourishment from it also had to die.)

Photo credit: Rain Forest Alliance