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Goethe and Gardens

© Kirk Johnson

Weimar is the European City of Culture for 1999. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832) was born in Frankfurt am Main, but from 1775 until his death, Goethe was closely connected with Weimar; so it is natural that Goethe's 250th birthday is the focal point of Weimar's year-long celebration of its rich heritage.

Several months ago I agreed to be in charge of a City of Culture event at Suite 101. When I agreed to do this, I had a feeling that I was vaguely familiar with Goethe's ideas about aesthetics; I thought that it wouldn't be too difficult to put together an article about Goethe and gardens. I blush to admit that I was confusing Goethe with Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 - 1768). I thought "Goethe? Oh yes. He was the gay expert on ancient Greek art, he had a strong influence on the Neo-Classical movement and he was murdered by one of the young men that he was in the habit of picking up" (this was the life of Winkelmann, not Goethe).

It isn't surprising that I was more familiar with Winkelmann than I was with Goethe. My background is much stronger in art and art history than in poetry. I am not very fond of most poetry which is written in English and I loathe most poetry which has been translated into English from another language. In researching this article I have learned quite a bit about Goethe, but very little about his thoughts on the subject of garden design.

Like many romantics, Goethe loved untamed nature; he was one of the first poets to take romance out of the shelter of gardens. Before Goethe, romance was considered best suited to moonlit walks along garden paths and trysts in garden pavilions. It isn't that Goethe wasn't interested in gardens; he was absolutely fascinated by botany and botanic collections and he loved the unpretentious garden which he began to create in 1776, next to his Gartenhaus in Weimar. It is just that Goethe doesn't seem to have written much about the design of gardens. In The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Goethe describes Werther's response to a country garden "The garden is a simple one, and the moment one enters it one feels that it was designed not by some scientific gardener but by a feeling heart intending to take pleasure here." Many people feel that Goethe was expressing his own response to gardens in this sentence. Engravings of Goethe's Gartenhaus at Weimar, show an unpretentious garden; most people would call it a cottage garden. Unlike many romantic gardens of the latter half of the eighteenth century, his garden was not cluttered with monuments and inscriptions. The only monument was a plain square cube about 3 feet by 3 feet (1 metre by 1 metre), which was surmounted by a plain stone sphere; Goethe called this his Altar of Good Fortune.