August von Goethe
Biography
The only one of Goethe's five children to reach adulthood. Born in Weimar in 1789 to Goethe and Christiane Vulpius, he trained as a jurist and served the duchy as chamberlain and chamber councillor, married in 1817, and died in Rome in 1830, two years before his father.
The four who did not live
His parents had five children. The four born after him, in 1791, 1793, 1795 and 1802, all died within days of birth. August is therefore the whole of the next generation, and everything about his position — the offices, the marriage, the household he grew up in and never left — follows from being the one who survived.
A career in the shadow of the name
He was a chamberlain and chamber councillor of Saxe-Weimar, which is to say he held court office in the duchy his father administered, in the town his father had made famous. The reference works record the posts and little else; the son of a monument does not get a biography of his own so much as a set of dates attached to somebody else's.
Rome, 1830
He married Ottilie von Pogwisch in Weimar in 1817 and they had four children. He died in Rome in 1830 — the city his father had made the destination of the most famous German journey of the age — and his widow, by the Neue Deutsche Biographie's account, experienced his death as a liberation. He is buried away from Weimar, and his father outlived him by two years.
Connected Places in Weimar
Frauenplan 1, 99423 Weimar
The household on the Frauenplan he grew up in and lived in as an adult.
Historical Context
The period's second generation, and the evidence of what it was like to be born into it.
For roughly sixty years a duchy of a few thousand people held the centre of German literature, because its ruler kept inviting writers to live there and then gave them jobs. That is the whole mechanism, and it ran from Goethe's arrival in 1775 to his death in 1832.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1789
1830
German