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Friedrich Schiller, where liberty and truth ruled so much.
    Fifteen miles from Jena was Weimar, the state’s capital, and the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet. Weimar had fewer than 1,000 houses and was said to be so small that everybody knew everybody. Cattle were driven through the cobbled streets and the post was delivered so irregularly that it was easier for Goethe to send a letter to his friend Schiller, who worked at the university in Jena, with his greengrocer on her delivery rounds rather than wait for the mail coach.
    In Jena and Weimar, one visitor said, the brightest minds came together like the sunrays in a magnifying glass. Wilhelm and Caroline had moved to Jena in spring 1794 and were part of the circle of friends around Goethe and Schiller. They lived on the market square opposite Schiller – so close that they could wave out of the window to arrange their daily meetings. When Alexander arrived, Wilhelm dispatched a quick note to Weimar, inviting Goethe to Jena. Goethe was happy to come and stayed, as always, in his guest rooms at the duke’s castle, not far away from the market square, just a couple of blocks north.
    During Humboldt’s visit, the men met every day. They made a lively group. There were noisy discussions and roaring laughter – frequently until late at night. Despite his youth, Humboldt often took the lead. He ‘forced us’ into the natural sciences, Goethe enthused, as they talked about zoology and volcanoes, as well as about botany, chemistry and Galvanism. ‘In eight days of reading books, one couldn’t learn as much as what he gives you in an hour,’ Goethe said.
    December 1794 was bitterly cold. The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for Napoleon’s troops on their warpath through Europe. Deep snow blanketed the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. But every morning just before sunrise, Humboldt, Goethe and a few other scientific friends trudged through the darkness and snow across Jena’s market square. Wrapped up in thick woollen coats, they passed the sturdy fourteenth-century town hall on their walk to the university where they attended lectures on anatomy. It was freezing in the almost empty auditorium in the medieval round stone tower that was part of the ancient city wall – but the advantage of the unusually low temperatures was that the cadavers they dissected there remained fresh for much longer. Goethe, who hated the cold and normally would have preferred the crackling heat of his stove, could not have been happier. He couldn’t stop talking. Humboldt’s presence stimulated him.
    Then in his mid-forties, Goethe was Germany’s most celebrated literary figure. Exactly two decades previously, he had been catapulted to international fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about a forlorn lover who commits suicide, which had encapsulated the sentimentality of that time. It became the book of a whole generation and many identified with the eponymous protagonist. The novel was published in most European languages and became so popular that countless men, including young Karl August, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed in a Werther uniform consisting of a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat, brown boots and round felt hat. People talked of Werther fever and the Chinese even produced Werther porcelain aimed at the European market.
    When Goethe first met Humboldt, he was no longer the dazzling young poet of the Sturm und Drang, the era of ‘Storm and Stress’. This German pre-Romantic period had celebrated individuality and a full spectrum of extreme feelings – from dramatic love to deep melancholy – all filled with passion, emotions, romantic poems and novels. In 1775, when Goethe had first been invited to Weimar by the then eighteen-year-old Karl August, he had embarked on a long round of love affairs, drunkenness and pranks. Goethe and Karl August had roistered through the streets of Weimar, sometimes wrapped in white sheets to scare