Goethe's Excellent Italian Adventure
By Peter von BeckerTwo hundred years after Goethe’s “Italian Journey” was first published, the story still reflects German longing for art, antiquities, lemon trees, sun-splashed coastlines and, of course, Rome.
Early in his career, Germany’s great writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe yearned for the land of classical Greeks.
It inspired him to retell the Greek myth of Iphigenia who, in distant exile, is the most dramatic and elegiac asylum-seeker in all of German literature.
His research took him on a journey to southern Europe – and led to quite a different book.
Goethe set off for southern Europe in the late 1700s, carrying an early version of his text “Iphigenia on Tauris.”
He only made it to Italy.
The tale of his pilgrimage, reconstructed years later from letters and diary entries into “Italian Journeys,” still voices German yearnings for the South.
Shortly after his 37th birthday, the poet headed south almost as if fleeing and incognito — to the “land where lemons blossom,” as his Mignon would later sing in the “Wilhelm Meister” novels.This year marks the 200th anniversary of his renowned “Italian Journey,” the first volume of which was published in 1816, followed by the second volume a year later.
By then Goethe was the world-acclaimed author of such works as “Sorrows of Young Werther,” “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” “Torquato Tasso” and “Iphigenia on Tauris,” which he completed in Italy...link
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