Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German playwright, poet, philosopher and historian. Schiller is considered by most Germans to be Germany's most important classical playwright.
Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust. The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. The Faust legend has been the basis for many literary, artistic, cinematic, and musical works that have reinterpreted it through the ages. "Faust" and the adjective "Faustian" imply sacrificing spiritual values for power, knowledge, or material gain.
Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter, draughtsman, and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works depict supernatural experiences, such as The Nightmare. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.
The Städel, officially the Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, is an art museum in Frankfurt, with one of the most important collections in Germany. The museum is located at the Museumsufer on the Sachsenhausen bank of the River Main. The Städel Museum owns 3,100 paintings, 660 sculptures, more than 4,600 photographs and more than 100,000 drawings and prints. It has around 7,000 m2 (75,000 sq ft) of display and a library of 115,000 books.
Barbara Honigmann is a German author, artist and theater director.
The Goethe House is a writer's house museum located in the Innenstadt district of Frankfurt, Germany. It is the birthplace and childhood home of German poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It is also the place where Goethe wrote his famous works Götz von Berlichingen,The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the first drafts of Urfaust. The house has mostly been operated as a museum since its 1863 purchase by the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, displaying period furniture and paintings from Goethe's time in the house.
The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and ape-like incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success. After its debut at the 1782 Royal Academy of London, critics and patrons reacted with horrified fascination. The work became widely popular, to the extent that it was parodied in political satire and engraved versions were widely distributed. In response, Fuseli produced at least three other versions.
Sturm und Drang was a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. Within the movement, individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements. The period is named after Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play of the same name, which was first performed by Abel Seyler's famed theatrical company in 1777.
Georg Heinrich Otto Volger was a German geologist from Lüneburg. He was the founder and first chairman of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, which he led from 1859 to 1882.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German polymath, who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. A poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic, his works include plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
The Museum für Moderne Kunst, or short MMK, in Frankfurt, was founded in 1981 and opened to the public 6 June 1991. The museum was designed by the Viennese architect Hans Hollein. It is part of Frankfurt's Museumsufer . Because of its triangular shape, the MMK is popularly called the Tortenstück. Since 2018, Susanne Pfeffer has been director of the MMK.
Hilmar Hoffmann was a German stage and film director, cultural politician and academic lecturer. He founded the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. He was for decades an influential city councillor in Frankfurt, where he initiated the Museumsufer of 15 museums, including the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. He was the president of the Goethe-Institut and taught at universities such as Bochum and Tel Aviv. He wrote the book Kultur für alle, which was a motto of his life and work.
Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret is an oil painting on canvas by English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1833 and now in Tate Britain. Intended to illustrate the virtues of honour and chastity, it depicts a scene from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in which the female warrior Britomart slays the evil magician Busirane and frees his captive, the beautiful Amoret. In Spenser's original poem Amoret has been tortured and mutilated by the time of her rescue, but Etty disliked the depiction of violence and portrayed her as unharmed.
Curt Gerhard Westphal, stage name Gert Westphal, was a German-Swiss actor, audiobook narrator, recitator and director, one of the best-known audiobook narrators and speakers in German, described as "König der Vorleser" and "der Caruso der Vorleser". After his reading of her husband's works, Katia Mann called him "des Dichters oberster Mund". The literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki said he was probably the best reciter of German.
Peter Iden is a German theater critic and art critic.
The Deutsches Romantik-Museum is a museum dedicated to German Romanticism, located in the Innenstadt area of Frankfurt, Germany.
The Freies Deutsches Hochstift is a literary association based in Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany. It is the owner of the Goethe House, the place where the playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born and spent his early years, which it operates as a museum. The Hochstift also manages the Deutsches Romantik-Museum, a museum dedicated to German Romanticism which opened in 2021.
Ernst Beutler was a German literary historian and Goethe researcher who served as the director of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift literary society between 1925 and 1960.
Christoph Perels is a German academic who served as director of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift literary association between 1983 and his retirement in 2003.
