Alma von Goethe

Alma von Goethe

Alma von Goethe at the age of five (pastel by Louise Seidler )

Alma (back right) with her brothers Walther Wolfgang and Wolfgang Maximilian 1836 (drawing by Bernhard von Arnswald )

Alma von Goethe (?) As Austria at the Austriabrunnen

Grave site at the historical cemetery in Weimar

Alma Sedina Henriette Cornelia von Goethe (born October 29, 1827 in Weimar , † September 29, 1844 in Vienna ) was the third child of August and Ottilie von Goethe and a granddaughter of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe .

Life

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived to see the granddaughter and called her "cute and friendly" or "teasing". She was portrayed by Louise Seidler . Alma von Goethe is said to have been a model for the Austriabrunnen in Vienna.

One month before her 17th birthday, she fell victim to a typhus epidemic during a stay in Vienna . On October 1, 1844, she was buried in the local cemetery in Währing - today's Währinger Schubertpark . In 1885 her bones were transferred to Weimar.

souvenir

Franz Grillparzer exalts Alma von Goethe in a poem he named after her:

Alma von Goethe

You did not think that,
you violent , When you were still living in the human race,
That your grandchild
should find early rest in the "land of the Phaeac".

And that the man who stood shyly in front of you,
His gaze lowered in front of the lofty ray of
yours , On the fabulous distant Isterstrand
At her open grave, I would cry.

Some things turn out differently than you think,
And when you came you were like the wise.
The sun, when it shines high in the
middle of the day, lowers slowly and gradually as it goes down.

The spirit turns towards new zones
and lets what is bare rust in gray darkness,
Is what the distant west means to us,
For other peoples also an east at the same time.

So your word penetrated, so your grandchild came
Into our morning-red-illuminated hallways;
My heart beat high, embellished as women are,
In her traces of your features can be found.

And so I stepped into the hall to pay homage,
where the tea maker was already crowning the tables, greeting the
woman, your son's choice, who
beautified the sunset of life for you.

But there was no other female being in the circle,
only gentlemen, black, as if a coffin were there.
Then the door opens, and bright and white
the girl steps on the threshold like children. Which

I thought to myself in the Highness Schein,
Shining with hereditary glory,
A tray of tea in her hands, she entered,
humbly serving bread for a hot drink.

But it was as if, like the Alder King,
The ancestral spirit hovered above her head,
And she, the child, like the child in the song,
trembled before the breath of a spiritual charge.

As on the oak trunk, which is inclined by lightning,
The flower brightly lifts the leaves,
As if your creator did not create it,
As if its ancestor sealed it like a lime.

She certainly felt the wave of the distant hand,
The longing for the land of pure lilies,
And went there, so traditionally as elective,
orphaned and doubling the Ottilie.

But you look down with a serious look,
Where the ground, close to Beethoven, has swallowed up,
And you shake
your head above the early grave: "That wasn't sung to you in the cradle!"

literature

• Louis Bobé : Alma von Goethe and her tomb. On the 100th anniversary of her death, September 29, 1944 . In: Goethe. Four month publication of the Goethe Society . No. 9, 1944.
• Dagmar von Gersdorff: Goethe's grandsons Walther, Wolfgang and Alma . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt and Leipzig 2009
• Karsten Hein: Ottilie von Goethe (1796–1872). Biography and literary relationships of Goethe's daughter-in-law (= European university publications. Series 1: German Language and Literature , Volume 1782). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2001, ISBN 3-631-37438-0 (dissertation University of Düsseldorf 2000, 398 pages).
• Karsten Hein: Ottilie von Goethe. Insights into the house on Frauenplan . In: Andreas Remmel, Paul Remmel (Ed.): Goethe-Blätter. Series of publications by the Goethe Society Siegburg e. V. Volume IV. Bernstein, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-9809762-4-4 .

Web links

• Engraving: Goethe and his granddaughter Alma

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl Robert Mandelkow : Goethe's letters. Hamburg edition in four volumes. Vol. 4: Letters from 1821–1832. 2nd Edition. Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg 1976, p. 609
2. ↑ Mandelkow 1976, pp. 267, 609.
3. ↑ Mandelkow 1976, pp. 383, 641
4. ^ Franz Grillparzer: Alma von Goethe. After: Ders .: Complete Works. Vol. 1: Poems - Epigrams - Dramas I. Carl-Hanser-Verlag , Munich 1960, pp. 298-299.