Public conference of the “Freien Deutschen Hochstifts – Frankfurter Goethe-Museum” in cooperation with the “Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv”, Weimar
Frankfurt am Main, September 24 and 25, 2020.

The theme of this year’s meeting of the Freie Deutsche Hochstift in collaboration with the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar, held at the Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, was Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Eastwestern Divan (West-östlicher Divan). The Workshop was devoted to papers on specific poems of the Divan and Goethe’s appended Notes and Treatises. A public evening event reunited the Arabic scholar Beatrice Gruendler, Freie Universität Berlin with the Iranian poet and translator or German poetry and philosophy, Ali Abdollahi. The conversation touched upon Goethe’s deep understanding of Arabic and Persian literatures, as evidenced in his poetic responses and reflections. Gruendler exemplified this by juxtaposing poems and sayings from the Divan’s chapters on reflections (“Tefkir Nameh”), wisdom sayings (“Hikmet-Nameh”), and parables (“Mathal-Nameh”) with models from Arabic poetry and prose and explaining how in each case Goethe reacted to his models, giving testimony of his intense engagement with this foreign literary heritage. Ali Abdollahi recited selections from his Persian translations of Goethe’s poems, gazhals by Hafiz, Goethe’s counterpart in the Divan, and from his own poetry.