JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German writer, poet, philosopher scientist, who is commonly considered the founding-father of modern German literature. Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main and educated first by his father and personal tutors, and subsequently at the universities of Leipzig and Strasbourg. In his youth he completed a Grand Tour to Italy (1786-1788), where he studied Italian art and archaeology. In 1772 he assumed a position at the Reichskammergericht in Wetzlar, the highest court in the German Empire. In 1775 he moved to Weimar, where he remained for the remainder of his life. He also fulfilled several administrative functions. In Weimar Goethe befriended Christoph Martin Wieland and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) who supported him in his literary efforts. He became a legend during his life, mainly because of his prolific oeuvre, especially the novels Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774/1787), Die Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796), and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1807/1821/1829), Die Wahlverwandschaften (1809), poetry (West-östlicher Diwan, 1819) and theatre plays and operas (Faust, 1797/1832), and his autobiography Aus meinem Leben, Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1812). His influence of intellectual life in Germany and Europe in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries was immense.

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Goethe was probably introduced to the Thousand and one nights, as a literary work of significance, by Christoph Martin Wieland and presumably read the translation of Galland’s Mille et une nuit into German by Heinrich Voss (1781-1785) and later the translation by Habicht (1825). Especially in his letters Goethe indicates that he has read the Thousand and one nights several times during his life and that he used it as a literary model in various ways. First, he was interested in the idea of a continuing story interrupted at specific intervals, as in the genre of the feuilleton; second, he practised the concept of a story which followed its own dynamics and contained embedded stories in his Die Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten; third, he appreciated the art of fabulieren and narration throughout his life, referring to the stories told by his mother, and applying it to several fairy tales; third, he used various motifs from the Thousand and one nights throughout his oeuvre; finally, he considered his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit as his ‘personal’ Thousand and one nights. These influences were combined with a more general interest in the literary and cultural world of the Orient, which resulted in his cycle West-östliche Diwan. Since the traces of the Nights in Goethe’s novels are mainly found in their narrative strategy and thus rather diffuse, we will limit our examples to Goethe’s fairy tales, which show his indebtedness to the imaginary and narrative world of the Thousand and one nights, combining the pleasure of fabulieren with Oriental motifs.