We Will Go Back to Our Old Gods Again – Goethe

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God, Goethe and the mammoth task of compiling his vocabulary

The Goethe lexicon is a huge project to create a lexicon of Goethe's entire vocabulary. It should be done in 2025.

Goethe didn't believe in God. But that didn't finish him from writing a total of 3,100 references to God in his works: 1,800 of those iii,100 references business concern the God of Christianity, the remaining ones refer to gods of the ancient world.

The Goethe dictionary additionally reveals that Goethe often didn't capitalize "Gott" (God), but rather wrote "gott." He once even forgot to add together the second "t."

Such facts, and many more than, can exist establish in the "Goethe Wörterbuch," the Goethe dictionary.

Bildergalerie Ferienhäuser von Dichtern und Denkern (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
93,000 words - it is thought that nobody had a bigger vocabulary than GoetheImage: picture alliance/dpa

An entire article is devoted to the theme of Goethe and God, enriched with curt analyses, quotations and cross references. Meticulously listed are dozens of discussion combinations that entail the word God, ranging from "Gottähnlichkeit" (godlikeness), "Gottbetörte" (God-beguiled) to "Götzentempel" (fake god temple).

However incomplete later on 70 years

Precisely 70 years agone, the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin initiated the huge project of the Goethe dictionary - a lexicon precisely list, describing and explaining every single word used by Goethe in his poems, dramas, letters, official writings and scientific essays.

In his speech on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the initiative, project manager Michael Niedermeier of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) said that back and so, the fourth dimension was ripe for this project.

Following the Nazi era, people were yearning for the imperturbable values epitomized by Goethe and his era. At the time, nobody could accept imagined that the project would go on over several generations, including the reunification of Frg.

An unsurpassed word pool

Goethe allowable the biggest always documented private lexicon of 93,000 words. The researchers take collected everything, ranging from verbs and nouns to prepositions and articles. Martin Luther, by comparing, "just" commanded 23,000 words.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe - Farbenkreis aus dem Jahr 1809
Goethe was not only a writer, he too analyzed the theory of colorsParadigm: gemeinfrei

It took more than 20 years but to list and evaluate these 93,000 words. But now, an stop is in sight. In terms of lexical evaluation, the nowadays squad consisting of 17 academics has reached the letters S and T. It is hoped that the project will be completed in 2025. Originally, the researchers had the twelvemonth 2040 in mind. Notwithstanding, the patience and the budget of the BBAW and of the academies in Heidelberg and Göttingen cooperating with information technology turned out to be limited after all.

The big Goethe network

In the view of Michael Niedermeier, the dictionary is a "cardinal instrument of exploring Classicism, and it will have decades and centuries until its full effect will be realized." After all, Goethe didn't merely write poems and dramas, but also essays on the theory of colors and many other scientific, political, philosophical and cultural phenomena.

Talking to DW, Niedermeier underlined that the online version that is now accessible in the internet opens upward new opportunities: "In the online version, we want to bring the dictionary to an entirely new level past linking it with topics such as color circles, the minerals of the Weimar collection and natural materials of the Jena drove."

Niedermeier is obviously reacting to criticism co-ordinate to which but a few Goethe enthusiasts would profit from the lexicon. He said that not only specialists in German studies, but also scientists, culture researchers and historians were targeted - in short, all those interested in the 18th century.

Correctly interpreting Goethe'south works

During the consequence held at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Niedermeier and his colleagues were trying their best to demonstrate how useful the Goethe dictionary was. Olaf Müller of Berlin'due south Humboldt University showed for example how the poem "Laßt mich weinen" (Let Me Weep) of the "West-Eastern Diwan" could be interpreted with the assist of the dictionary. The last give-and-take of the poem, "grunelt," is no longer in use in German.

Goethe experts have e'er considered that verb, "gruneln," as an expression of a local dialect that sort of softened the tension inherent in the poem at its end. Just on the ground of the lexicon, Müller has demonstrated that with the strange word "gruneln," Goethe had something else in mind, namely transformation and renewal. In this sense, the poem culminates with a celebration of renewed life.

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Source: https://learngerman.dw.com/en/god-goethe-and-the-mammoth-task-of-compiling-his-vocabulary/a-36751351

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