“O humano que jamais nos abandona”: A obra epistolar de Goethe

Abstract

This essay makes an incursion into Goethe’s correspondence. It is estimated he wrote approximately 20,000 letters (to about 1,700 recipients) and received 25,000. In the foreground are letters written in his old age, especially those of condolences and those that expound his aesthetic concepts or details of his creative process. The last two sections of the essay focus on Goethe’s correspondence with the “Brazilian” Martius (as the poet himself referred to the botanist who traveled eleven thousand kilometers in Brazil) and the central position that Goethe’s epistolary work occupies in the anthology Deutsche Menschen [German men and women], published by Walter Benjamin in 1936 with the aim of increasing resistance to fascism.