Episode Details

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the most towering figure in German literature — poet, novelist, playwright, scientist, and statesman — and he lived two lives that never fully reconciled. The young Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther and nearly caused a suicide epidemic across Europe. The older Goethe served as a government minister, conducted scientific research, and spent sixty years writing Faust, the poem that tried to contain the entire human experience in verse.

This episode traces Goethe from the Werther sensation through the Italian journey that transformed him, the decades of government service in Weimar, and the completion of Faust on his deathbed.

• The Sorrows of Young Werther and the "Werther effect" — the novel that triggered copycat suicides across Europe
• The Italian journey that turned a romantic rebel into a classicist
• Forty years of government service in Weimar alongside forty years of literary production
• The sixty-year composition of Faust and the deathbed completion of Part Two