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Who recorded Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s conversations in his final years?
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, engraving by James Posselwhite, 19th century.
The individual who recorded the conversations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe during his final years was his literary assistant, Johann Peter Eckermann.
Eckermann documented these interactions in his three-volume work, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1823–32 (Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life), published between 1836 and 1848. These records are considered an artistically selective arrangement of Goethe’s thoughts and life, rather than simple transcripts, and are often compared in significance to James Boswell’s Life of Johnson.1