Ottilie von Goethe
Also known as: née von Pogwisch
Biography
She married into the most famous household in Germany at twenty-one and spent the rest of her life dealing with the consequences. Born in Danzig in 1796, she married Goethe's son August in Weimar in 1817, kept house in the Frauenplan and outlived nearly everyone in it, dying in Weimar in 1872.
A widow at thirty-four
August died in Rome in 1830, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie does not soften how that landed: it describes her turning, after a death she experienced as a liberation, to friendships with men in a bizarre enthusiasm fed by the cult of Byron. That is a reference work being unusually blunt about a marriage, and it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing away, because the standard account of the Goethe household rarely admits that anyone in it was unhappy.
She edited a magazine
Between 1829 and 1832 she edited a journal called Chaos — produced inside Weimar's literary circles while her father-in-law was still alive and working a few rooms away. It is the detail that turns her from an appendage of the family into someone doing her own work in the middle of it.
Vienna, and the long afterlife
She moved to Vienna in 1835 and stayed until 1866, keeping intellectual company and defending her father-in-law's legacy from there — three decades of being the person who had actually lived with him. She had four children: Walther, Wolfgang, Alma, who died at seventeen, and a daughter born outside the marriage who lived a year. Then she came back to Weimar to die.
Notable Works & Achievements
Chaos (journal, 1829–1832)
Connected Places in Weimar
Frauenplan 1, 99423 Weimar
She lived in the household on the Frauenplan, later in a roof apartment of the house.
Historical Context
The generation that had to live in the period after it ended, inside its most famous building.
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
1796
1872
German
On stage
On stage
Walter Hesse
She is the second role: the daughter-in-law nursing him through his last months, played on this stage by Heike Meyer.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
He died in the house on the Frauenplan he had rented since 1782, and on 26 March was carried into the ducal vault to lie beside Schiller.
His daughter-in-law, who stayed in the household and defended his legacy for forty years afterwards.