"Like a stripped snake skin" he now feels parts of his "West-Eastern Divan", as Johann Peter Eckermann recorded a statement by Goethe in January 1827.

Previously, at a house concert, settings from the Divan had been heard, "Lieb 'um Liebe" and "Suleika", and the latter in particular has shown itself to be suitable for "stimulating the deepest emotions", says Eckermann.

All the more surprising then, Goethe's statement about the poems that had first appeared eight years earlier: "Both what is oriental and what is passionate in it has ceased to live on in me."

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the features section.

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Orientation and passion are what one would like to count among the decisive inspirations for the “Divan”. Secondary literature that is difficult to survey describes how Goethe, inspired by Joseph von Hammer's translation of Hafez (1814) and his love for the Frankfurt banker's wife Marianne von Willemer, wrote his collection of poems. “Little is missing that I still learn Arabic”, he wrote to Schlosser on January 23, 1815, “I want to practice at least as much as I can with writing covers that I can reproduce the original amulets, talismans, abraxas and seals.” Who Visited the exhibition "Poetic Pearls" in the arcade hall of the Free German Hochstift in Frankfurt two years ago, was able to see these really splendid writing exercises by Goethe, and also Divan manuscripts in Latin script, as signs,that here the foreign and the own come together to form a third, which in turn is different from the two starting spheres (FAZ of August 22, 2019).

The manuscript, which has now come to the manuscript collection of the Goethe and Schiller Archives from an auction, is written in the usual Kurrent, personally and signed by Goethe on August 28, 1829, on his eightieth birthday. It contains the second stanza of the “Divan” poem “Freedom”, albeit with a significant variant: Instead of “He set you the stars / As a ladder to land and sea”, the first word here is “God”. It is not yet known who he wrote these lines for.