GoetheA masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty first century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and as Rdiger Safranksi emphasizes a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The