Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“In the last days of the free knights, Götz of the Iron Hand — a rough, honest, loyal man who serves only God, the Emperor and his own conscience — wages his private feuds against the Bishop of Bamberg and the cities. His boyhood friend Weislingen, won back to him and then lost again to the court and the beautiful, dangerous Adelheid, betrays him; besieged, cheated, imprisoned, forced to lead the rebel peasants, Götz dies in a prison garden crying for freedom.”

“In letters to his friend Wilhelm, a gifted, passionate young man tells of a spring and summer in the country, of nature, children and Homer, and of Lotte, whom he meets on the way to a ball and loves from the first moment, though she is promised to another. He goes away, is humiliated at court, comes back, and finds her married; and as the year darkens, the letters break off, and an editor tells the end.”

“Wilhelm, a merchant's son who has loved the theatre since his childhood puppet show, flees his father's counting house to become an actor. Among strolling players, a sad old harper and the mysterious child Mignon, at a count's castle and on Serlo's stage, where he plays Hamlet, he learns slowly and through many errors what he is fit for — while a secret society watches over him, until his apprenticeship is declared at an end.”

“Doctor Faust has studied everything and knows nothing; on Easter night he is ready to die. Then the Devil comes to his study as a travelling scholar and offers him the world, and Faust wagers his soul that no moment will ever satisfy him. Made young again, he meets Margarete — Gretchen — a simple, devout girl of the town, and his love, with the Devil's help, destroys her mother, her brother, her child and herself.”

“On a country estate, Eduard and Charlotte, married at last after long separation, invite two others into their quiet life: Eduard's friend the Captain and Charlotte's young niece Ottilie. As in the chemical reaction the Captain explains one evening, the pairs dissolve and recombine — Eduard drawn irresistibly to Ottilie, Charlotte to the Captain — and duty, passion and chance work their way through gardens, a lake, a chapel and a child, to a quiet and terrible end.”

“Goethe's own account of colour, built not on Newton's prism but on what the eye sees: colours as the deeds and sufferings of light, arising where light meets darkness — in the eye itself, in hazy and transparent media, and in substances — and ending in the moral and aesthetic effect of each colour on the mind, from the serene warmth of yellow to the gravity and dignity of purple.”

“In September 1786 Goethe, minister of a small German court and the most famous writer in Germany, slips away from Karlsbad before dawn under a false name and goes south. In diary entries and letters he records the Alps, Lake Garda, Palladio's Vicenza, Venice, his long-desired Rome, Naples under Vesuvius, Sicily's temples and the search for the primal plant, and a second year in Rome among artists — and comes home a changed man.”

“After Gretchen's death Faust wakes, healed by spirits, and goes with Mephistopheles out into the 'great world': he saves a bankrupt Emperor with paper money, conjures Helen of Troy, travels through the Classical Walpurgis Night, weds Helen in a dream of Arcadia, wins a kingdom from the sea — and, old, blind and guilty, at last speaks the words of his wager. But the angels carry off what is immortal in him.”