J. W. Goethe Commemorative Plaque in Bílina-Kyselka

1810–1813 (plaque unveiled 1932) 

Goethe visited Bílina several times between 1810 and 1813. In addition to the famous spa springs, the poet and naturalist was also attracted to the Bořeň hill and the company of the physician and geognostician Franz Ambros Reuss, with whom he took numerous walks and held discussions about the formation of rocks.

 

The landscape of Teplice and the views of the Bohemian Central Highlands enchanted Goethe. He wrote about them in his diary and letters. The origin of these conical hills, whose volcanic origin seems quite obvious to us today, was one of the motives of Goethe's trips to Bílina. The poet went to the Bořeň hill in Bílina several times and made numerous sketches of it. Franz Ambros Reuss was Goethe's companion on these expeditions. Reuss, like Goethe, studied geology in Freiberg under Gottlob Werner, who founded the school of thought known as Neptunism (after the god of water, Neptune), which assumes the formation of rocks by sedimentation and crystallization in a water environment. Basalt was thought to be the product of underground coal seam fires. The opposing trend of Plutonism (named after the god of the underworld Pluto) or also Vulcanism, on the contrary, worked with the theory of the origin from the fire of the Earth's interior. Goethe alternated between the two sides, and the formation of rocks remained an open question for him, as can be seen in the description of the local landscape in his letter to a friend: “On the south side of the Krušné Mountains the landscape is cheerful and free, and on the other side of the mountains there are a strange basaltic, Phonolite, pseudo-volcanic, so-called Central Highlands. Particularly magnificent is the huge, solemn, and in many picturesque parts interesting and distinct shape of the Bílina Rock [Bořeň].” (The term “pseudo-volcanic” here indicates his ambiguous opinion on the origin of basalt.)
A commemorative plaque with a relief portrait of J. W. Goethe in Bílina-Kyselka by local sculptor Ottomar Laube (1912-1945) was originally placed on the road to Bořeň. Like most of the Goethe sites in Bohemia, it was set in the year of the centenary of the poet's death (1932). After 1945 the plaque disappeared and its replica was unveiled on the initiative of the town of Bílina in 2011 on the building of the inhalatorium of the Bílina spa. Miloslav Stingl, a native of Bilina, traveller and explorer, was one of the dignitaries at the unveiling ceremony (1930–2020).

 

References

Bílinský zpravodaj: Goethe má v Bílině pamětní desku. Květen 2011. URL: https://www.bilina.cz [26. 1. 2021].
Fejfar, O.: Lázeňský host, geolog a výletník: Přírodovědná zkoumání Johanna W. Goetha během jeho pobytů v Čechách. Živa, 6/2011, s. 89–91.
Urzidil, J.: Goethe v Čechách. Příbram 2009, 501 s.

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