He is Germany’s most famous literary son, whose upright posture deep into old age impressed many of his contemporaries.
But on Tuesday it emerged that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — the biggest name in the German cultural pantheon and the German-speaking world’s answer to Shakespeare — suffered for more than 40 years from acute backache.
According to Dr Herbert Ullrich, a German anthropologist who has just published a book on the skeletons of famous people, for most of his life Goethe had extreme difficulty in bending over.
By the time of his death in 1832, at 82, the author of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther had also lost most of his teeth. A study of his bones showed that several of his ribs had fused, making it hard to breath, Dr Ullrich said.
Ullrich was one of a handful of experts in communist East Germany who in 1961 secretly travelled to Weimar, the birthplace of the German enlightenment and the city where Goethe lived and died. There, they lifted the lid off his sarcophagus.
On Tuesday Ullrich said that at the time the poet’s mummified remains appeared in ”good shape”. Two years later, however, scientists had another look and discovered that Goethe’s body was starting to decay — leading them to take the drastic step in 1970 of removing Goethe’s remaining flesh from his bones, in a clandestine night-time operation.
Newly released black and white photos of Goethe’s skeleton revealed that he was suffering from Morbus Forestier, a severe pathological deformation, where several vertebrae fuse, Ullrich said. The disease set in when Goethe was about 40, he added.
”It was a very painful condition,” Ullrich (72) who teaches at Berlin’s Humboldt University, pointed out. The revelation sheds new light on the poet’s frequent trips to the mountains of west Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic, where he would bathe repeatedly in local spas — presumably to relieve his agonising back pain.
At the age of 72, during a trip to the spa town of Marienbad, Goethe fell in love with a 19-year-old girl Ulrike von Levetzan, the subject of several of his most passionate elegies. She, however, rejected his advances. Back in Weimer contemporaries who spotted the ageing Goethe going for a walk said he had the ”upright bearing” of a young man.
On Tuesday Ullrich said he didn’t take part in the controversial operation to ”macerate” Goethe in 1970 — news of which only emerged five years ago, after East German authorities hushed it up.
But he defended his decision to examine Goethe’s corpse in the early 60s, pointing out that as well as being a poet, playwright, novelist and travel writer, Goethe was a scientist.
”He would have approved,” he said. ”Opening his coffin was a moving experience.
”We only had a quick look. His body was covered with a cloth. Only his hands and face were visible. On his head was a laurel crown.”
The coffin was strewn with seaweed and the poet was buried in a shroud, Ullrich said. It was later that his colleagues discovered five of Goethe’s bones were in fact missing from the skeleton, apparently stolen by American soldiers who recovered his sarcophagus at the end of World War II, foiling an order by the Nazis to blow him up.
Goethe’s spruced-up skeleton, meanwhile, now rests in a neo-classical crypt in Weimar, next to the coffin of his friend Friedrich Schiller, the celebrated German playwright and author of Wilhelm Tell.
Life and loves
Poet, novelist, playwright, and natural philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gained early fame with his first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) but his most famous work is a poetic drama in two parts, Faust. He began aged 23, only to finish it before his death six decades later.
Born in Frankfurt am Main, Goethe was educated at home and at Leipzig University, where an unhappy love affair prompted his earliest writings
A leading figure in the literary Stürm and Drang movement, he took a job in the small court of Weimar. As well as running the court’s finances, he made scientific discoveries.
Christiane Vulpius became his mistress in 1789. They eventually married in 1806. He died in Weimar in March 1832. – Guardian Unlimited Â