Goethe’s Hiking Weeks

Goethe was here. The Literature Museum is exhibiting original manuscripts, landscape drawings, paintings, busts, medals and porcelain on the life and work of the world-famous author.

Special exhibitions, lectures, readings, theater performances, concerts, projects and workshops for children round out the museum’s program.

The library of the Goethe Museum, a scientific research and study institution, is open to the public as a reference library.

Tischbein’s painting of Goethe with the hiker’s hat in front of the panorama of the Albanian mountains even today still conveys to us the image of the author as a hiker. As one who crosses ruins, climbs the Brocken, ascends Mount Vesuvius.

But the author is also driven by “reverse homesickness”, and the inclination to go far away, “so far, far away”, also comes up again and again in conversations, letters, and verses. And Goethe – in armchair travels – is also drawn to places he only knows from books, like the landscapes of the “Orient”.

Next to the River Thames? On top of the Matterhorn? In Milan? Quiz your way through the museum and the places Goethe visited – or did he? The prizes are exotic luggage stickers, and then you will send Goethe around the world in your drawings.