English anyway, but also the Goethe Institutes are doing double and triple shifts these days.
He is chief of the department of medicine at JW Goethe University Hospital in Frankfurt.
So by the end of 1999 Goethe will be known through and through, right?
Remember the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm.
Medieval artists knew that mixing hues freely would produce grey mud (this is what threw Goethe off).
Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller.
But it was Goethe who, in the richest of verse, made of it a drama with truly Germanic resonance.
Pop singers are being invited to give their own versions of Goethe texts.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 classic "The Sorrows of Young Werther" triggered a spate of copycat suicides all over Europe.
Nifty ideas, of course, but will they and the rest of the birthday shindigs really make Goethe easier to fathom?
Like Plato, Goethe or Berlin, writers and philosophers had long drifted in and out of public view, holding forth on life in general.
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Goethe's restless curiosity led him to develop theories about everything from the structure of bones to the properties of colour.
Like Goethe's classic novel "Elective Affinities" (glimpsed in the film), "Jules and Jim" confronts the dangers and exigencies of free will.
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But then Goethe always was a complex writer who defied full comprehension.
Yet so much of Goethe's other work is anything but typisch deutsch.
That's when some new Goethe will write his Young Werther, and the Digital Romantic Age will begin...and the Mensurstube will look like home.
But unification eventually brought the countries closer, argues Sabine Hentzsch of the Goethe Institute in London, which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
It's a sly, ironic portrait of a Goethe-quoting 60-something gent who is dating a considerably younger woman, much to the sardonic amusement of her friends.
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Despite the awe of these fans, much of Goethe's scientific writing now goes unread, and there are signs that even his literature may be under threat.
On the other hand, didn't Goethe encourage Johann Peter Eckermann, the tireless amanuensis he met in 1823 whom he knew was recording his words for posterity?
"Perhaps we have to learn to laugh too, at us, at them, " said Christoph Muecher, head of the commission for marketing at Germany's cultural arm, the Goethe Institute.
"At the moment it is really cool to read all the very well-informed and positive articles about German football in the British press, " says Karl Pfeiffer, the director of educational links at London's Goethe-Institut.
At any rate, the scientist in him would have been intrigued to learn that Goethe-ites have set up an Internet website chronometer that ticks off in milliseconds the time to their idol's birthday on August 28th.
Some time, with the rise of Romanticism is the early nineteenth century (Goethe was the hometown writer, after all), the students began to clear away the tables after dinner and indulge themselves in the mock-Medieveal arts...dueling, in particular.
Another design, from Daniel Liebeskind, features a 141-metre (154-yard) long broken wall which directs the eyes of visitors towards the Tiergarten park and a monument to Goethe, so inviting them to reflect on the highs and lows of German history.
Mr Ball next treats us to a brisk description of the human eye (remember rods and cones from school biology?), an explanation of why Newton was right and Goethe wrong about the composite character of white light, and an account of the 19th-century regimentation of the continuous colour spectrum by means of colour wheels and other classifying devices.
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