Goethe in 1778

Head injuries of Roman gladiators

Should any readers have wondered why Goethe Girl has been absent from posting here and also Goethe's Tweets, it is not because she has been victim to the virus. In late December an errant piece of heavy furniture fell on her head, and she was remanded for the month of January to what the neurologist called "home rest" -- in other words: house arrest, as it involved cessation of much that was important to her: no reading, writing, or physical activity, for going on five weeks. She was allowed to listen to audio books, as long as headaches didn't trouble her, and she made her way through William Meisters Lehrjahare and several of Goethe's novellas (along with Jane Austen's major novels). It has to be said that the German readers of Goethe's works are not as good as English readers. The Germans don't distinguish the different characters in their voices as well, and Goethe's WMLJ can be rather tedious to listen to. It is this drawback that has kept her from downloading Dichtung und Wahrheit, as the two samples on Audible are not enticing. Both male readers have wonderful voices, but they seem to be enchanted with their own voices, rather than with the story they are telling.

Released at the beginning of February there was a lot to catch up on. I had really been looking forward in January to posting Goethe's diary entries on Twitter, as January 1778 was filled with activities. First off, he finished writing the first book of the so-called Urmeister. It is amazing that he had any time to write, as his life that month was chockablock with court-related activities.

Ekhof by Anton Graf (1774)

It being January there were skating parties and sleigh rides, alongside rehearsals for a performance of the play The West Indian by Richard Cumberland. It was directed by Conrad Ekhof, theater director in Gotha, with whom Goethe seems to have had a conversation over dinner ("Eckhof as mit mir. Erzählte die Geschichte seines Lebens"). Since Goethe played the title role in the play when it was performed in Weimar on January 13, allow me to quote from the Wikipedia entry describing the hero:

Its hero, who probably owes much to the suggestion of Garrick, is a young scapegrace fresh from the tropics, "with rum and sugar enough belonging to him to make all the water in the Thames into punch," — a libertine with generous instincts, which prevail in the end.

Goethe's play Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit was performed for the duchess's birthday on January 30, but the month might be said to have been overshadowed by the suicide on January 17 of the 16-year-old "Hoffräulein" Christel von Laßberg. Goethe was among those who went to her parents' home that evening. He notes in his diary on January 18 that Knebel spent the night at his house and that they discussed the suicide: "Viel über der Christel Todt. Dies ganze Wesen. Dabey ihre letzten Pfade ppp."

Image: ScienceDirect