Johann Peter Eckermann

Eckermann was born at Winsen (Luhe) in Harburg, Holy Roman Empire. According to an unfinished draft for an autobiography, Eckermann's father had once owned a small business, but lost it, and took up work as a peddler; Eckermann helped him carry his goods, and remembered being very happy at this time. He did not learn to read or write until he was fourteen years old. In the same draft, Eckermann recalls experiencing an "irrepressible drive to copy" when, as a small child, he noticed a horse designed on a packet of tobacco; he drew the horse, and feeling that "my imitation was completely like the model [...] I enjoyed a happiness hitherto unknown to me." From then on, he writes, "the drive towards sensuous reproduction, once awakened, never left me." After serving as a volunteer in the War of Liberation (1813–1814), Eckermann obtained a secretarial appointment under the war department at Hanover. In 1817, although twenty-five years of age, he was enabled to attend the Gymnasium of Hanover and afterwards the University of Göttingen, which, however, after one year's residence as a student of law, he left in 1822. His acquaintance with Goethe began in the following year when Eckermann sent to Goethe the manuscript of Beiträge zur Poesie (1823). Soon afterwards he went to Weimar, where he supported himself as a private tutor.