In 1865 already, Woldemar von Biedermann wrote a two-volume study of the period, from October 1765 to August 1768, that Goethe spent in Leipzig ostensibly studying law. Among others, Wilhelm Bode devoted over one hundred pages to this period in Goethes Leben: Lehrjahre 1749–1771 (1920). Gustav Roethe (1932), Stuart Atkins (1949), Heinrich Meyer (1951), and Ernst Beutler (1957) have written essays on Goethe's Leipzig letters, while individual letters have been treated by Albrecht Schöne (1967) and recently by me (Goethe Yearbook 8 [1996]). Still, Goethe in Leipzig remains a neglected field of scholarship, although the surviving documents—thirty-eight letters written by Goethe in Leipzig and another twenty to Leipzig after his return to Frankfurt, plus two collections of poems—are a rich resource compared to the evidence of his stay in Strassburg from April 1770 to August 1771, of which there is no end of scholarship. Of the “real” Goethe in Leipzig, however, one might think that all the evidence has been evaluated. It was therefore with some interest that I read of Manfred Zittel's promise to bring to light “erstaunlich viel inhaltlich Neues über die Studentenjahre Goethes in Leipzig” (9).

In the event, like the rest of us Zittel relies for his interpretation mainly on two sets of letters by Goethe, one written to his sister Cornelia, the other to Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch, the thirty-year-old tutor of Count Lindenau, son of the chief equerry in Dresden, whom Goethe met in 1766 at the Schönkopf “Mittagstisch” and to whom he quickly became attached. The thirteen letters to Cornelia, many in French, date from Goethe's earliest days in Leipzig. Besides confirming the close relationship between brother and sister, they correspond to a familiar picture of Goethe: his fondness for female company, his pedantic side, his linguistic inventiveness, his considerable memory for literary texts, his independence of mind and selectiveness when it came to criticism. They give a strong impression of the influence of reading on self-conception in the eighteenth century. They are chatty, and Goethe seems to experience all the ups and downs of a young man on his own in a setting for which he is not altogether unprepared, socially, intellectually, or otherwise.