Goethe blossoms in Alsace. No other landscape…
May 1772 CE
No other landscape does he describe as affectionately as the warm, wide Rhine area.
In Strasbourg, Goethe has met Johann Gottfried Herder.
The two have become close friends, and crucially to Goethe's intellectual development, Herder has kindlesd his interest in Shakespeare, Ossian and in the notion of Volkspoesie (folk poetry).
On October 14, 1772 Goethe had held a gathering in his parental home in honor of the first German "Shakespeare Day".
His first acquaintance with Shakespeare's works is described as his personal awakening in literature.
On a trip to the village Sessenheim, Goethe had fallen in love with Friederike Brion, in October 1770, but, after ten months, terminated the relationship in August 1771.
Several of his poems, like "Willkommen und Abschied", "Sesenheimer Lieder" and "Heidenröslein", originate from this time.
At the end of August 1771, Goethe had acquired the academic degree of the Lizenziat (Licentia docendi) in Frankfurt and established a small legal practice.
Although in his academic work he had expressed the ambition to make jurisprudence progressively more humane, his inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first cases, and he was reprimanded and lost further ones.
This had prematurely terminated his career as a lawyer after only a few months.
At this time, Goethe is acquainted with the court of Darmstadt, where his inventiveness is praised.
From this milieu comese Johann Georg Schlosser (who is later to become his brother-in-law) and Johann Heinrich Merck.
Goethe also pursues literary plans again; this time, his father does not have anything against it, and even helps.
Goethe obtains a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants' War.
In a couple of weeks the biography is reworked into a colourful drama.
Entitled Götz von Berlichingen, the work goes directly to the heart of Goethe's contemporaries.
Goethe cannot subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical (published by Schlosser and Merck).
In May 1772 he once more begins the practice of law at Wetzlar.
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