History can be awakened through noise.

The creaking of the centuries-old floorboards in the villa on Frauenplan gives the dusty people a presence that fills the room.

The supervisor standing there in the museum, asked whether the creaking reaches into his dreams because it is loud, waves his hand: he doesn't hear it.

He hides that.

Only a few hear it that way.

On the way to Goethe's house, which was inhabited by many, not only by the German spiritual hero, his thoughts, his desire and displeasure, but by other people, family members and servants, a shadowy realm of the less clearly remembered, but which was existential for his existence.

The members of this shadow realm ran, scurried, trudged, slinked and went their countless ways.

Between the kitchen, garden, pantry, apse, basement and attic.

The house was and is an event.

There are long ways to go because the house is a bourgeois palace.

People hold audio guides to their ears and have the functions of the rooms explained to them.

They are reminiscent of figures in a dollhouse.

The information brings the history of the house closer to them and drowns out the house's own noises.

Anyone who walks over old floorboards, which still vibrate due to the enormous elasticity of the material, after centuries still emit the unavoidable sound noises in the rhythm of the footsteps, hears those who have walked before, those who have walked away, who are to be walked.

It is a stimulus to listen to them

Goethe was an admirer of ancient oaks that populate some rooms of the house on faded facsimiles of drawings.

Like Caspar David Friedrich, the Romantic artist who was first praised by Goethe, then polemically criticized and even damned.

Friedrich also admired oak trees, which he observed and drew more closely than almost anyone before.

The rustic trees were symbols of time and vitality for him.

The age and liveliness of the oak trees from which the wood for the floorboards in Goethe's house was sawn can be felt.

They let us sink in imperceptibly, creating that wonderful noise that invites us to an imaginary conversation with our predecessors.

The house is to be restored from 2026 onwards.

Don't let the creaking of the floorboards go away!