Poets and Thinkers

A high quality weekly broadsheet named die Zeit, the Time, published a paperback entitled The hundred books of the Time, which simply declared what books by German authors should be read. A copy was kindly donated to me by Hildegard, a wonderful woman from Berlin and my temporary secretary, shortly after my arrival.
A fantastic guide and a wonderful gesture, both proving fairly fruitless since I only managed a few titles. Reading German has remained frustrating mostly due to my perpetually slow speed compared to other languages.
Of course the classics were listed. Goethe, Hesse, Kant were noted, as were more recent authors. Germans love to read almost as much as the Finnish people and the quality of literature by German authors is legendary.
Though I have wondered about something over the years. As a lover of the language, I often debated with friends about where the saying Dichter und Denker or poets and thinkers arose from. I wondered from time to time whether it refers not the country of poets and thinkers but to the country of poets that were constantly thinking how to end their rather long and complex sentences.