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Title: Conversations of Goethe by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, John Oxenford, Johann Peter Eckermann, Havelock Ellis, J. K. Moorhead ISBN: 0306808811 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5
Rating: 5
Summary: A friend between the covers. . .
Comment: I love Goethe's creative works and his scientific theories, but most of all I love this book. I travel with it, look in it for advice and conversation. As an artist Goethe was incomparable; as a scientist he was curious, alive, observant, questioning -- but as a man who lived a life with a conscious intention to make his life a work of his own mind and heart he is the master and that master is found in the pages of this book. When I need a wise friend, I turn here and find, beside the wisdom, a silly person who thought spectacles were an affectation, an attempt on the part of someone to be something he was not. . .
Rating: 5
Summary: A Relatively Unknown, Yet Great Book
Comment: While in graduate school in Australia I happened in a pub (which is not extraordinary in itself) and got to talking with the bar-tender. It turns out that he was a student at the Univ. of Queensland too and was getting his MA in German. I told him how much I enjoyed Nietzche, who was the focus of his thesis, and eventually we got around to Eckermann's Coversations. I told him it was one of the best books that I had ever read: so quaint and yet probing. The reader sits in the drawing room and hears the most extrodinary discussions. In this way it reminds me of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. It is so civilized that it is almost nostalgic--but far too potent for that due to the genuis involved (Eckermann's mind ain't to shabby either). The newly made friend expressed amazement that an English major happened on this book; he said that I had been the only person outside the German dept that he had met that had ever read the book, or even heard of it (and this in a much more literate country than here). This is truely a shame we agreed. Ease-drop on a better time when scholars were gentleman, and in search of the truth not some PC BS, and were enamored with ideas. Goethe's Maxims is also highly recommended--as Faust and his other better known works. A Western classic, like the subject.
Rating: 5
Summary: Essential reading; the mind of the Universal Genius revealed
Comment: For those who do not know anything about Goethe at all, 'Conversations' may not be a good place to start - but for those who are a little familiar with Goethe, 'Conversations of Goethe' makes for fascinating reading.
Very rarely do we have the life of a genius so well and closely documented. This book is not a record of formal interviews; it is a record by Eckermann, Goethe's good friend, who took the trouble to write down the great man's words almost every day, it seems. The book reads like a diary of Eckermann's, filled with Goethe - there is one entry for almost every day for a few weeks, then a break, and so on.
Eckermann seems to have written down almost everything he remembered from his conversations - and some of what Goethe said here may be edifyong, some not so much; but all of it is significant for one trying to get an insight into Goethe's mind - how it worked, how he thought, how he did things - right from the grand projects down to the simple pleasures.
One comes away from this book with an "insiders glimpse" of the Goethe's mind and world - and that really helps when reading his works.
The idea of Goethe as the complete, the perfect man, the universal genius - sticks with the reader years after reading this book. We live in an age when the really good things do not matter; Goethe reminds us of all the things that can, and do matter - and those things that can refresh, change, and enliven.
Nietzsche called this "the greatest book in German there is".
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