Do you think the most important people from literature and history were fully respectable, dull people? Then you were fooled.
Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman were tangled in a love-triangle. Lord Byron is responsible for Twilight and his...
Since our former chapters focused on the British Isles and a bit of America, let's move our focus to other countries in the world in Room 9: In this case, Germany. And how they lost their best poet.
I don't mean that he died. No, they freaking lost him.
How could it come to this and what am I even talking about? Buckle up for some wild complications, a whole lot of homoerotic subtext and some pathology.
What you must know about German literature is that they have two guys that outshine literally everyone else. Everyone else is maybe a hero or a king, but those two are the Gods. Or are at least presented like that. What Shakespeare is to the English literature or Dante Alighieri to the Italian, Goethe and Schiller are for German lit.
Because those are their names, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Not as handy as Dante, but hey, mostly they are abbreviated to their last names anyway.
Goethe is the older and more famed one of the two. And with 'more famed', I mean that every single German teacher has a Goethe-kink. Really. I am no exception, I have an eraser that is a small Goethe-bust. It doesn't help that German students have to read a work by Goethe each school year from Class 10 onwards. Goethes name is so much connected with German school literature that there is a very successful satire movie about chaotic ghetto-students that is called "Fuck you, Goethe". Just so you know how well known that dude is. Every German knows his name.
Good old grandpa Goethe was born 1749 and not only a poet and writer, but also a natural scientist, lawyer and privy councilor.
I found two portraits of him. A handsome one:
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When Goethe was still in his young Storm-and-Stress-phase, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called "The Sorrows Of Young Werther" that lead to his literary break-through because everyone was Shocked by it.
The story is not quite original: Werther falls in love with a girl, girl is engaged, Werther dows not get together with the girl, Werther shots himself in the head.
