Sterne in stiller werdenden Nächten

This book owes its existence to the amazement in view of the intellectual complexity, the material and thematic richness, the abundance of formal variation, the ruthlessness towards the audience that Goethe displayed in the works written in the last 25 years of his life. In a series of individual studies, it seeks to answer the question of the inner unity of Goethe's late work and of the ideational connections holding this thematic and formal diversity together, which always includes the question of the connection between life and work. This coherence of work-related and biographical aspects, so it argues, is founded in a writing situation of productive solitude enabling Goethe to write as if the audience did not exist. In this way, he was able to make his thematic and formal decisions with complete freedom, and also to allow his works to gradually emerge over long periods of time as they themselves demanded, rather than as they conformed to the expectations of the literary market.

Ernst Osterkamp ist Professor emeritus für Deutsche Literatur an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Seit 2017 ist er Präsident der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.