Besuch vom Teufel – Goethes letzte Tage
By Walter Hesse
Mephisto calls on his author in his last months, and delivers a verdict on the man rather than the work.
In 7 days
9 September 2026 · 20:00 Uhr
About Besuch vom Teufel – Goethes letzte Tage
An end-game, the house calls it, and the visitor is a devil. Goethe is eighty-two and in the care of his daughter-in-law Ottilie when a figure out of his own Faust turns up in the house on the Frauenplan to settle accounts. The line the production is built around is Mephisto's and it is brutal about the difference between an author and his output: the work cannot be shaken and will last for all eternity — but Goethe the human being is a catastrophe. What follows is the old man taking stock, and the verdict the evening reaches is a harsh one.
Performances
Also on stage here
Where
Lucas-Cranach-Haus, Markt 11/12, 99423 Weimar
Organiser
Theater im Gewölbe
Facts checked against the organiser on 29 August 2026
Places and people
Historical figures
1749–1832 • writer • statesman • naturalist
He is the subject and the character: his own Mephisto arrives to audit his life in his last months.
1796–1872 • editor • salonnière
She is the second role: the daughter-in-law nursing him through his last months, played on this stage by Heike Meyer.
Historical periods
Set at the very end of the classical decades, in the house on the Frauenplan.
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.