In this book, Sigrid Damm has succeeded in vividly presenting the secret center of Goethe's life and work, which has lost none of its relevance today. The images by Hamster Damm, with their consciously anti-classical style, illustrate Goethe's ideas, the biographical contexts, and the particularly relevant connections to the present. "I only want to see how far I can follow the man in his shafts and ore veins," Goethe wrote as early as 1773. And the following sentence could serve as a kind of motto for his life and poetry: "In the narrowest tunnel, as in the deepest shafts / To seek a light that ignites the spirit." The image of the mountain, of the earth, is one of the central motifs of Goethe's work, from the "Urfaust" of the Sturm und Drang period to the completion of the human drama in his last year of life. In poetry, in novels and drama, always.