World IN BRIEF / GERMANY : Cities Mark Goethe’s 250th Birthday

Germans crowded into Frankfurt and Weimar by the thousands to celebrate the 250th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the world-renowned poet. Dozens of men in top hats and tails and women in the costumes of Goethe’s time strolled the streets around Frankfurt’s opera house, where Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder presented the Goethe Prize to 73-year-old German author Siegfried Lenz. Festivities in the city where Goethe was born, on Aug. 28, 1749, also included a showing of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1926 silent film “Faust,” based on Goethe’s dramatic poem about a man who makes a pact with the devil for universal knowledge. In Weimar, where Goethe lived and wrote most of his works from 1775 until his death in 1832, festivities included readings, period music and a street festival.