Makeover to enhance appeal of Goethe shrine for teens (Feature)

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin and Antje Lauschner Jan 3, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Berlin - A makeover is to begin this year on the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, making the house in Weimar, Germany, where he wrote his greatest works more accessible to teenagers.

Imitated but never surpassed by other museums round the globe, Goethe's Home is the ultimate literary shrine, containing not just the writer's study, more or less as he left it when he died in 1832, but also his private, 7,000-volume library and his carriage.

Even visitors who have never read Goethe cannot help but be impressed at this German intellectual personality cult.

England has preserved the homes of two Nobel Literature laureates, Rudyard Kipling (1907) and George Bernard Shaw (1925). Russia has Yasnaya Polyana, home of the great writer Leo Tolstoy, and US time capsules include Sunnyside, home of novelist Washington Irving.

Those comfortable mansions contain each writer's library and study, but none of them reaches back to the late 18th century as Goethe's Home does. Napoleon's soldiers even invaded Goethe's bedroom in 1806 and threatened him with bayonets.

The German writer, whose 1774 first best-seller The Sorrows of Young Werther triggered a Europe-wide fascination with suicide, owned the home for 50 years and remodelled it according to his own Classicist tastes.

Goethe installed a grand staircase with niches for his sculptures, and parlours to impress guests who came round to beg favours while he was a government minister of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.

At the back, the private rooms, where he wrote his greatest work, the drama Faust, and where he, his wife and servants lived, are plain.

As an inveterate collector of fine art, minerals, coins and other treasures, Goethe (1749 - 1832) also needed space to stash it all. His collections are still there, along with the garden where he conducted botanical experiments in 1794.

While older Germans who were raised on Goethe at school visit the house with hushed reverence, younger Germans find it rather puzzling.

Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the federal foundation which runs Goethe's Home as well as a pretty wooden house in a nearby park where Goethe spent his summers for inspiration, has decided to make the museum more accessible to non-bookworms.

The house itself is too sacred to touch, but an information centre in an adjacent building will be altered.

Its 10-year-old permanent exhibition, which is showing wear and tear, will be replaced, says Wolfgang Holler, director-general of the foundation's Weimar museums. Instead of talking about the world of old Weimar, the new show will focus tightly on Goethe only.

'We want a breath of fresh air in this literary museum,' he says. 'We have noticed that the public fascination isn't the same any more, and that the presentation is not state of the art.'

Of the 180,000 people who visit Goethe's House every year, fewer and fewer come to venerate a favourite poet. More and more of those who put on headsets and walk through the house listening to the audio guide have merely heard of his name and are curious to discover more.

Outside Germany, his fame has also waned. The name is sometimes better known in connection with the German government's external culture agency, the Goethe Institute, which is named after the poet.

The Weimar information centre will focus on explaining what it is in Goethe's writings that is relevant today, with topics to include nature, genius and political power in the hands of intellectuals.

To illustrate the politics topic, the information centre will for example display Goethe's court uniform and the medals on it that were awarded by his own government, Napoleon and the czar of Russia.

'He was definitely a man of power,' said Holler.

The changes are to be completed by Goethe's birthday in 2012, on August 28.

The foundation also plans to improve the visitor experience.

The house faces a central square in Weimar, a pretty city in central Germany with a claim to being one of Europe's intellectual capitals.

Goethe's house has two gated archways facing a central-city square. These allowed a horse and carriage to enter on the left, pick up passengers in the covered courtyard and then exit on the right.

In future, visitors will enter the complex through one of the arches.

'They won't have to come in any more through a narrow side door,' said Holler.

The information centre will also produce an introductory film to get visitors in the mood to see the House.

Internet: http://www.klassik-stiftung.de/index.php?id=22

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