Recently, a friend from writers group asked me to find some information about the famous German writer, Goethe. While doing my own research on my ancestry and the Kaiser Hof Hotel Sonne in Nördlingen, I discovered that Goethe lived there for a year in 1788.

It’s amazing how life works and how the threads of our lives weave in and out. How our attitudes and values are influenced by how we see the world, and who we see in it. While Goethe was living in Nördlingen, Captain Cook in the Endeavour claimed Australia as belonging to Britain (as one would back then). And I wonder what Goethe thought of Nördlingen and my ancestors. Did he give much thought to the discovery of Australia and that someday, a little over a century hence, a descendant of those ancestors, or perhaps a relative who may have visited the hotel, would be emigrating to Australia with their family.

Or was Goethe instead mulling over Faust and completing the manuscript?

And then I consider my novels and the War Against Boris series, and how the evil character of Boris grew and developed in my imagination. Where did he come from?

And I think of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s quote from Faust that captures that we are the sum of our past, including ancestry, present and future, our destiny by how we see the world.

“A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

© Lee-Anne Marie Kling 2022

Feature painting: Diamonds in the Cave © L.M. Kling 2019