August von Goethe

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
August von Goethe, drawn by Julie Countess Egloffstein

Julius August Walther von Goethe (born December 25, 1789 in Weimar ; † October 27, 1830 in Rome ) was the son of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . He belonged to the court of Grand Duke Carl August von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach .

Life

August von Goethe was the only one of the five children Christiane and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to reach adulthood. In 1808/09 he studied law for three semesters at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . He joined the Corps Guestphalia (I) . Three more semesters followed at the University of Jena .

At the age of 27 he married Ottilie von Pogwisch (1796–1872) on June 17, 1817 in Weimar . The marriage soon proved problematic. The couple had three children, Walther , Wolfgang Maximilian and Alma .

August von Goethe was at the Weimar court from 1810 uncharacterized chamber - Assessor , 1811 definitely set in the state and court service was 1,813 Hofjunker, 1815 Gentleman and Kammerrat and 1823 Secret Chamberlain . In 1825 the Weimar City Council granted him, together with his two sons and all male descendants, citizenship of the residential city of Weimar for perpetuity.

When the mother died in 1816, August von Goethe replaced her for the father, among other things in her capacity as correspondent. Hardly oppressed by a lack of genius of his own, he was on the one hand paralyzed by the superior strength of his father, but on the other hand also excessively dissolute. Like his parents, he was probably overly fond of alcohol. August remained de facto the subordinate of his father and fulfilled, among other things, his wish to keep family books and travel diaries without real interest .

He supported his father knowledgeably and, above all, scientifically interested in the "supervision of the immediate institutions for art and science" and avoided playing out his role as the son of the important poet.

The writer Karl von Holtei was one of Goethe's friends .

Italy trip and death

Grave of August von Goethe

At the end of April 1830, Goethe went to Italy with his father's confidante, Johann Peter Eckermann , in order to get away from home completely and to calm down. The journey initially led via Frankfurt am Main , Basel , Lausanne and Milan to Venice and via Mantua , Cremona and Lodi back to Milan. After Eckermann fell ill and had separated from Goethe on August 25th to return home, he traveled via La Spezia , where he suffered a crash in a car and then became ill himself, on to Florence and via Livorno and Naples to Rome . He died on the night of 26 to 27 October a smallpox . The autopsy revealed a chronic subdural hematoma .

German artists buried him in the Protestant cemetery near the Cestius pyramid . In Rome, August also came into contact with August Kestner , the son of the lover whom Goethe's father worshiped as Lotte in the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther . He worked in diplomatic services as a Hanoverian Legation Councilor to the Holy See . Above all, he took care of the funeral of August and the notification of the father. He was later buried in this cemetery himself.

The tombstone bears a medallion of the dead man made by Thorwaldsen and the inscription written by his father Goethe, which conceals the first name:

GOETHE FILIVS / PATRI / ANTEVERTENS / OBIIT / ANNOR [VM] XL / MDCCCXXX
(Goethe the son / the father / previous / died / at the age of 40/1830) 

Works

literature

Web links

Commons : August von Goethe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g Karl Robert Mandelkow : Goethe's letters. Hamburg edition in four volumes. Volume 3: Letters from 1805-1821. Critically reviewed and annotated by Bodo Morawe . Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg 1965, p. 550.
  2. a b c d e Mandelkow, Morawe 1965, p. 549.
  3. ^ FA Pietzsch: August von Goethe as Heidelberg Westphalian . In: then and now. Yearbook of the Association for Corporate Student History Research 9 (1964), pp. 137–148.
  4. a b Mandelkow, Morawe 1965, p. 667.
  5. ^ Karl Robert Mandelkow: Goethe's letters. Hamburg edition in four volumes. Volume 4: Letters from 1821–1832. 2nd, revised edition. Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg 1976, p. 575.
  6. Frank Nager: The healing poet. Goethe and medicine. Artemis, Zurich / Munich 1990; 4th edition ibid 1992, ISBN 3-7608-1043-8 , p. 66 f.
  7. The Führer Goethe treasure . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 2000 ( online ).
  8. Michael Sachs: 'Prince Bishop and Vagabond'. The story of a friendship between the Prince-Bishop of Breslau Heinrich Förster (1799–1881) and the writer and actor Karl von Holtei (1798–1880). Edited textually based on the original Holteis manuscript. In: Medical historical messages. Journal for the history of science and specialist prose research. Volume 35, 2016 (2018), pp. 223–291, here: p. 281.
  9. Mandelkow 1976, p. 640.
  10. Mandelkow 1976, pp. 640-641.
  11. a b c d Mandelkow 1976, p. 641.
  12. Frank Nager: The healing poet. Goethe and medicine. Artemis, Zurich / Munich 1990; 4th edition ibid 1992, ISBN 3-7608-1043-8 , 66 f.
  13. Volker Breidecker: Rome. A cultural and historical travel guide. Stuttgart (Reclam) 2000, p. 258. ISBN 3-15-010466-1 .
  14. German Goethe's son died before his father at the age of 40 in 1830.