Goethe’s autobiography
Dichtung und Wahrheit is at the centre of a wide-ranging autobiographical project whose interdisciplinary potential is currently coming into focus anew. This volume brings together the proceedings of a symposium held in Weimar in the context of the emerging digital research platform on Goethe’s Biographica (PROPYLÄEN). In addition to the connections that can be shown between Goethe’s various autobiographical writings, the focus was on the dense networks that link them to the pragmatic text types of letters, diaries and memoirs. The references between poetic and autobiographical works are also included, which not only consist of Goethe retrospectively placing the creation of his poetry in the context of his life story (whereby this in turn becomes a ‘work’), but also imply the interferences that result from the mutually influencing writing processes in which poetic, historical-biographical, pragmatic and autobiographical texts were created simultaneously.
About the author
Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main;
Bernhard Fischer, Klassik Stiftung Weimar.