Centred around Johann Wolfgang Goethe's parental home, the Museum is a combination of memorial place, painting gallery, manuscripts archive, print collection and library.
Goethe's parental home on Grosser Hirschgraben is one of Germany's most significant and popular memorial houses. With period furniture and old works of art in sixteen rooms on four floors it elucidates the domestic world in which the famous poet spent his childhood.
The Goethe Museum, a painting gallery from the Goethe era, shows the relationship of the poet to art and artists of his days. The spectrum ranges from Frankfurt artists of the late baroque through to German Romanticism. It includes such famous names as Johann Heinrich Füssli, Caspar David Friedrich, Jacob Philipp Hackert and many more. The publicly accessible reading and research library, with around 120,000 books, and the comprehensive archive, with ca. 40,000 manuscripts, play a key role in the research and intermediary activities of the institution.
Special exhibitions of items from the graphic collection, the manuscripts archive and the library allow a direct confrontation with precious and sensitive documents and graphic prints and manifest the vivid interplay of the various arts.