Chapter 2 introduces the two places which were the most significant in Goethe’s life: Frankfurt, the city of his birth, and Weimar, the duchy where he lived from the age of twenty-six. The chapter explains the differing political weight of Frankfurt and Weimar – Frankfurt being the nearest that the Holy Roman Empire had to a capital city, Weimar being altogether more provincial, though nonetheless the capital of one of the more important ‘old principalities’. Moreover, it sets the two places in the context of the upheavals of the time, examining, for example, Weimar’s shifting geopolitical allegiances during and after the Napoleonic era.