In 1749, when Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main, his hometown was one of the hundreds of more or less independent states that made up the Holy Roman Empire. By our standards, Frankfurt was a modestly sized town of about 36,000 inhabitants but, at the time, it was surprisingly cosmopolitan. Not only was it the site of the emperor's coronation, but, according to Nicolas Boyle, trade with England was handled by the descendants of Dutch immigrants and Huguenots, who were French Protestants who fled their homeland in 1685 rather than convert to Catholicism. According to Philipp Ther, Huguenots gave French and English the word refugee. Frankfurt was also home to a community of Italian importers of Mediterranean fruit and Jewish families that had been expelled from elsewhere in Germany. A little more than a decade after Goethe's birth, the local Rothschild family founded a bank that became one of the world's leading financial institutions, with branches in London, Vienna, Paris, and Milan.

The contrast between Frankfurt and the bulk of the empire could scarcely have been greater. The empire's population was overwhelmingly rural and most people lived and died inside a ten-mile radius around their home villages. They also spoke a bewildering array of mutually incomprehensible dialects, and the idea of a common German identity had not yet been invented. E. J. Hobsbawm estimates that in 1789 only 300,000 to 500,000 people read Hochdeutsch, and far fewer of the people who were “German” spoke the language that supposedly united them. In other words, the cultural prerequisites for the nation as a cultural community were not yet present. What we now think of as Germany was an agglomeration of places that were foreign to one another. Although this history is often overlooked, it should be common knowledge; even more pertinent are the questions it raises: first, why do situations in Goethe's birthplace and the rest of the empire matter to the legacy of the eighteenth century in scholarly research? And, second, what does the particular context into which Goethe was born have to do with thinking about him as a migrant?