Happy Birthday, Goethe

Drawing of Gerbermühle by Boisserée

 The Canadian embargo on American visitors was lifted on August 9, and on August 12 Goethe Girl flew to the small island in British Columbia where she has spent almost a decade of summers. She got through the lockdown in New York without major or even minor incidents, but the loss of her visit to B.C. last summer was keenly felt. Since she is staying here only a month, she is restricting herself to one Goethe project, which includes reading some very early scholarship on Goethe’s pre-Weimar years, most of which is online (thus, no need to carry books while traveling). One of these books, a short volume entitled Goethe und Frankfurt am Main: Die Beziehungen des Dichters zu seiner Vaterstadt (published 1876), is by Wilhelm Friedrich Karl Stricker.

Since today, August 28, is Goethe’s birthday, let us quote details from Stricker concerning the festivities for on his sixty-sixth birthday in 1815, which took place at the Gerbermühle, country get-away of the banker Johann Jacob von Willemer and his wife Marianne. There is a prehistory to this visit and Goethe’s acquaintance with Marianne, in whom Goethe, according to Bielschowsky in his biography, discovered his “love nucleus” for the Divan.

In 1814, Goethe had traveled to the Rhine and Main region of his youth. Peace had been restored and he wished to take a cure in Wiesbaden. He had begun work on his Divan. The first word in his travel journal was “Hafiz,” and indeed the journal shows him rejuvenated. It was in September that he went to Frankfurt, his first visit since his mother’s death in 1808. It was there that he met Willemer, a patron of the theater in Frankfurt and with whom he was already acquainted, and Marianne. On October 18 he visited the Willemers at the Gerbermühle. As Stricker writes of the effect of this 1814 visit:  

So flüchtig diese Begegnung war, so nachhaltig waren ihre Folgen; haben wir doch in ihr vielleicht das bestimmende Motiv für die zweite Rheinreise zu suchen.

Johann Jacob Willemer

According to the Wikipedia article on him, Willemer afterward wrote to Goethe and offered him a retreat (something like I enjoy here in British Columbia): “Erholen sie sich doch bald von den Beschwerden des Winters zu Weimar an den Ufern des Mains. Sie könnten ja die Vor-Kur zu Oberrad einleiten und bei uns auf der Mühle wohnen.”

And so in 1815 Goethe traveled for the second time to the Rhein and Main region, staying in the Gerbermühle from the end of May until past the middle of July. He undertook other travels while in this region, for instance, revisiting the Roman antiquities in Mainz, which he had seen before leaving to study in Strassburg decades earlier, and he also was in contact with Sulpiz Boisserée, with whom he had spent time the previous year studying his collection of medieval art. It was with Boisserée that he returned in August 1815 to the Gerbermühle. The evening of August 27 began a grand birthday celebration, arranged by Boisserée, Here is Boisserée’s account (I, 271), quoted by Stricker:

Die Familie Willemer, Herr Scharf und seine Frau, Fritz Schlosser, der Kastenschreiber Riese, und Seebeck sind schon mit dem alten Herrn beim Frühstück versammelt.  Das große Gartenhaus war ganz mit Schilf ausgeziert, wie Palmenbäume zwischen den Fenstern gebunden, oben überhängend. An der hinteren Wand, wo der Alte saß, war ein großer Spitzschild von Laubkränzen angebracht, darinnen ein runder Kranz von Blumen, nach der Farbentheorie geordnet.

The ladies of the house, who included Marianne and the daughter of her husband, presented Goethe with baskets, one containing beautiful fruits, the other gorgeous flowers, mostly foreign. On the basket was a turban of the finest Indian muslin, garlanded with a laurel wreath: “alles in Anspielung auf seine jetzige Liebhaberei für die orientalische Poesie, besonders weil auch unter seinen Gedichten ein großes Lob des Turbans vorkommt.”

Willemer toasted Goethe’s health with a 1748 Rhine wine. There is much more in the account, with birthday greetings and visitors pouring in from all sides. It is somewhat sad to see Goethe referred to as “der Alte.” I wonder what he made of such veneration. He was probably used to it by this time. The mill in any case turned out to be a good place to work on the Divan, which he continue to do mornings until September 15, while spending evenings with Marianne exchanging verse.

Among the above-mentioned personalities at the birthday party, two might be noted: Johann Jacob Riese, Goethe’s childhood friend and one of the few from his early years with whom he maintained a lifelong connection; and Johann Thomas Seebeck, a physicist who worked with Goethe on his color theory.

Speaking of the Rhine/Main region, I would like to add that Goethe, during his travels there in 1814, also visited Winkel, the country seat of Peter and Antonie Brentano, spending eight days visiting the Rheingau. It turns out that Goethe Girl herself was in Winkel 213 years later. See my post “Goethe in Rheingau,” which has some details of Goethe’s comments on his visit there. The photo of Goethe Girl with the bottle of “Goethe Wine” was taken at the nearby Schloß Vollrads.

Image of Willemer from 1793 by Joseph Nicolaus Peroux