"Werther" is a very 18th century Sturm und Drang novel. Warning: academic diatribe ahead: I know in the English speaking world, that entire period of German literature is swept up under the label "Romantic", but that drives every German literature teacher crazy. German Romantic literature = Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, the Schlegels. All of whom writing in the 19th century. Very much NOT Goethe, who in his old age in the 1820s once went on a "I loathe Romantic literature" rant. What young Goethe, Lenz, Herder, and young Schiller were writing in the 1770s and 1780s was Sturm und Drang, it's own genre; they then moved on to other styles, in Goethe's and Schiller's case creating the German classic period. So whenever I see an English language publication refer to "Werther" as a romantic novel, every single literature teacher and professor I ever had howls in protest in my mind.
Back to good old Werther: being an 18th century novel, it mostly consists of letters. (With fake editorial comments.) (Reminder: Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" and "Pamela" are probably the most famous letter-novels in English of the era; Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote "Julie, or the New Heloise" as his entry to the genre; and then of course there's "Les Liasons Dangereuses" by Chloderos de Laclos. Plus of course now we know Voltaire created his own letter novel. *g*) Said letters are written by our titular hero to his childhood bff Wilhelm. Now, there are two rl inspirations for what unfolds. One was young Goethe - supposed to study the law, but not too keen on that because he knows he's more into writing already - coming to a German small town, Wetzlar, falling in love with Charlotte Buff who is already engaged, being friends with her and her fiance and then husband for a while while flirting a lot and then departing from Wetzlar, to fall in love with another married woman next. (He kept in letter writing contact with Charlotte and her husband for some more years, though.) The other inspiration is that while Goethe was hanging out with Charlotte, he also met, in the same town, a young guy with the last name of Jerusalem. Who was in love with a married woman as well (not Charlotte Buff), only unlike Goethe did not fall out of it again but committed suicide, with pistols he borrowed from Kestner, Charlotte Buff's husband, who wrote about the whole affair to Goethe (who by then was back in Frankfurt.) Now Goethe hadn't been great friends with Jerusalem, but he'd known him, and the coincidence, the might-have-been was eerie, and out of the combination of these two events grew the idea of a novel. (Mind you, said novel ended his friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Kestner, because naming the heroine "Lotte", using a lot of autobiographical incidents and mixing them with the Jerusalem tale did not strike them as cool.)
Werther in the novel, unlike Goethe, isn't a writer, he has Jerusalem's job(s), but he meets Lotte the way Goethe met Charlotte Buff (the scene subsequently became much imitated and parodied, hilariously by Thackeray in a limerick) - mutual aquaintances pick her up for a countryside ball at her father's house (nobody is a noble here, so shared carriages are a thing for money saving purposes), where because she's the oldest sister and her mother is dead she's still busy cutting bread and butter for her kid siblings for dinner before rushing off to the ball. She and Werther then hit it off over loving the same poetry - Klopstock - and having a sneaky fondness for trashy English novels, dance, and he falls in love with her while learning she's engaged. After some more weeks of hanging out together and enjoying literature and hiking (this is the era where the middle class discovers taking strolls through landscapes as a hobby), her fiance Albert shows up, and Werther tries to be fair: Albert is a good guy who loves Lotte. Werther attempts to do the sensible thing and leave after one more evening with Lotte and Albert (on Goethe's real life birthday, August 28th), taking a position elsewhere as an envoy's secretary.
However, the elsewhere doesn't work out, not least because it's a court and Werther is a non-noble and gets snubbed by the nobility. He quits and returns to the small town where Lotte and Albert are now married. Now Werther has given up being fair to Albert and sees him in a far more critical light (this is also where Kestner wrote an "WTF, Goethe?!?" letter when reading that part of the novel in protest), as someone who takes Lotte for granted and doesn't appreciate her enough. Lotte and Werther geeking out about literature is still a thing, but now he's into Ossian. (Cue subsequent readers, aware that the Ossian poems were a fraud, wondering whether Goethe is doing this to signal Werther's mental decline. Since Goethe himself didn't known yet when writing that the poems were a fraud, probably not.) Events come to a head in a kiss after which she tells him to leave, and he commits suicide the way rl Jerusalem did. Then we get the famous last sentence of the novel (from the supposed editor of the letters) stating that Werther, as a suicide, was buried outside the town. "Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." (This in is contemporary context is a wham last line managing to depict the treatment of suicides by the clergy of both main faiths as heartless without ever saying so.)
Now, what made this novel such a big bestseller at the time (and inspired a Werther fashion craze, with young men wearing the outfit Werther wears when first meeting Lotte and young women Lotte's dress, not to mention the infamous Werther style suicides) wasn't the plot as such, it was the language, the immediacy of feeling (remember, in theatre, French formalism still ruled absolutely), the nature descriptions (aside from this being a life long interest of Goethe's, he pulls out all the stops of being a young gifted writer here), the novelty that the characters and what they experience aren't nobles (aside from Werther's brief stint as an envoy's secretary, which is summed up in a letter to Wilhelm), they're people you could actually meet, and there's no villain (even when critical about Albert as a husband, the worst Werther can accuse him of smugness and self satisfaction). Also, while the letter format was the most popular format for novels at the time, somehow the Werther-to-Wilhelm letters really struck a nerve, feeling authentic to many a reader in a way the other letter-novels didn't. The preamble of the novel, addressing the reader and saying that if for some reason life hadn't granted them a friend, they should regard this book as that friend, even heightened the identification.
It certainly worked this way for Karl Philip Moritz, who unlike Goethe had an upbringing more like Fritz', only the lower class version - his father was a tyrannical super religious military man, he went through a horrid abusive school, then a horrid abusive master (he was supposed to become a hatmaker), when he ran away. For Moritz, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" became what music and literature were for Fritz, he regarded the book as his friend, and of course he fanboyed the author. Now, this could have gone horribly wrong - not a few people who loved "Werther" were irritated to disappointed to crushed when meeting Goethe later in life, when he hadn't just moved on stylistically but also was a courtier and minister (of Carl August, remember), not to mention sharp tongued if he wanted to be. But Moritz lucked out, for he met Goethe when Goethe was on his two years "finding myself again as a poet" runaway time in Italy, and Goethe wasn't just kind to him but memorably described Moritz as "my damaged younger brother", seeing in him a might have been if he hadn't lucked out by being born the son of a wealthy Frankfurt citizen and given all the advantages from that, so Moritz from this point onwards had connections and job security. He still died young (his health was wrecked), and left German literature with the haunting autobiographical novel "Anton Reiser" which is perhaps the first German literary text to astutely describe psychological abuse through childhood and youth, and the long term damage resulting from this. "Anton Reiser" also contains a description of the narrator reading "Werther" for the first time, and "I'm not alone anymore! Here's someone who feels as I do!" is very much a part of it.
Another famous Werther fan was Napoleon, who read it dozens of times (in translation, of course), wrote a bad imitative novel as a young man as a result, and upon his meeting with Goethe had a "Han shot first" type of conversation with him. (There are two versions of the novel; the later edition contains some more editorial comments and more stuff about Werther's job frustrations, possibly because the author by then was working at the Weimar court. Napoleon liked the original version with minimal fake editorial comments better.) For today's readers, coming to the novel from a completely different context than later 18th century readers, the impact is basically impossible to reproduce. However, there's a very good 1970s novel by Ulrich Plenzdorf, "Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.", in which the hero, Edgar Wibeau, comes across the novel by accident and mocks everything about it, only to find himself in a plot where basically everything that happened to Werther happens to him, and he comes to understand Werther more and more. Instead of letters, the novel consists of transcriptions of tape recordings as Edgar speaks his thoughts on tape for his buddy Willy.) It's an East German novel which also has to get around GDR censorship - for example, Edgar as a drop out instead of a young man eager to join the work force had to be presented in a way that didn't glorify hippiedom (that's something for decadent Westerners!), and no sympathetic hero of a novel licensed by GDR censorship could be allowed to commit suicide (in a worker's paradise? No way!), which with the death being quintessential to the plot was a problem. However, Plenzdorf got around censorship in style - Edgar is perfectly willing to join the work force, just in a way that puts his ability to good use, so after his firing from the equivalent of the secretary-to-an-envoy situation (this is working as part of a a handymen's unit), he is busy secretly inventing and building a machine to help the handymen's unit with painting that's supposed to prove to them his abilities, and it's this invention being badly haywired that gets him killed after his night-plus-ensueing-goodbye with Charlie; he doesn't commit deliberately suicide. However, the subtext of him just risking it because he doesn't see a point anymore is quite strong.
Okay, I am indebted to mildred mentioning this because I should have realized that I could just ask you about Werther and you would tell me in a way that would explain to me why I should read it, but it... never occurred to me! (Though I am interested in reading it, because it's one of those things I haven't got around to reading yet, I guess it's no surprise that I am interested partially because of the Massenet opera, which I have never seen, and, er, because there's an extant production with a young Thomas Hampson, which is the one I'd see if I watched it :D )
I know in the English speaking world, that entire period of German literature is swept up under the label "Romantic", but that drives every German literature teacher crazy.
This is good to know, because yeah, this is what I have heard. But now I know :)
Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" and "Pamela" are probably the most famous letter-novels in English of the era; Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote "Julie, or the New Heloise" as his entry to the genre
Oh! I haven't read these but I know them from Pushkin mentioning them in Eugene Onegin :D (Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?) Everything is starting to make sense :P
(He kept in letter writing contact with Charlotte and her husband for some more years, though.)
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
not least because it's a court and Werther is a non-noble and gets snubbed by the nobility.
I suppose this isn't fair to Jerusalem, but I find this hilarious given what you've told us about Goethe and Carl August.
(this is also where Kestner wrote an "WTF, Goethe?!?" letter when reading that part of the novel in protest)
Aw, man. I can see why Kestner was not amused.
"Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." (This in is contemporary context is a wham last line managing to depict the treatment of suicides by the clergy of both main faiths as heartless without ever saying so.)
Ohhhhh, I see. (And this is the kind of thing I am really glad you are telling me!)
The preamble of the novel, addressing the reader and saying that if for some reason life hadn't granted them a friend, they should regard this book as that friend, even heightened the identification.
Even though the Kestner thing still annoys me, this is actually rather touching to me.
However, Plenzdorf got around censorship in style
Wow, yeah, I like that.
Thank you for this! I shall put it on my (sadly extremely large) stack of things to read :D Though I am thinking that I should read a biography of Goethe first (not that you haven't been awfully helpful with that too), as knowing a bit about Voltaire beforehand certainly helped a lot with Candide :)
The Massenet opera: is a very French and 19th century take. The novel leaves it ambiguous how much Lotte requites Werther's feelings - she likes him, she loves geeking out with him, and she might even be attracted to him, but she does love her fiance/husband, and whether she ever loves Werther is up to debate. And like I said, Albert is NOT the villain of the tale, and even in the second half of the novel when Werther is very Albert-critical, he doesn't find worse things to say than smug, self satisfied, takes Lotte for granted, boring. The opera, otoh, changes this so that Lotte is unquestioningly in love with Werther, is only with Albert because her mother wished that with her dying breath and her father wants it as well, and Albert turns into a domestic tyrant who forbids Lotte Werther's company once they're married. (The novel's Albert never does, he trusts her completely.) This said, the music is beautiful, but much like Gounoud's Faust is not Goethe's Faust, Massenet's Werther is not Goethe's Werther, either. Have an aria anyway. (That's Jonas Kaufmann singing "Pourquoi me reveiller".)
While I'm providing links: Lego Werther, a hilarious summary of the novel in English.
Another trailer, quoting directly from the letter Werther writers after his first encounter with Lotte and showing the locations in Wetzlar (there was A LOT of Werther tourism in the late 18th and then in the 19th century because Goethe had described the locations for the various scenes very recognizably, which was another thing that the Kestners weren't thrilled about)
Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?
They do!
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
Well, quite. Thomas Mann wrote a novel called "Lotte in Weimar" about Charlotte Kestner, nee Buff, visiting Weimar 44 years later and basically closing that chapter of her life with one last meeting. By then, she's on the one hand treated by all the Weimar society as a walking, talking bit of literature which both flatters and irritates her, but on the other avoided by Goethe; their one meeting in public is inconclusive and she's dissappointed that he's now so formal and a walking, talking institution, but then they meet again in a carriage and have a real conversation, allowing her to make peace with the past. It's a famous novel (also filmed) but has one problem, and that's Thomas Mann basically writing Goethe as himself. (He very much saw himself as the new Goethe in his life time.) And they were different people with different tempers, to put it simply. (His version is why avid Thomas-Mann-reader Susan Sontag, in her novel about Sir William Hamilton in which Goethe has a cameo showing up in Italy where he meets Sir William and Emma, writes Goethe as Thomas Mann, too,)
Biography of Goethe: postpone that, not just because there is so much else to read, but also because he lived a very long and rich life, and also I don't know which English language biography is good. Otoh, there is a short text available in English which I just ordered for you (also just in case my calendar doesn't arrive), which is one of the "incensed monologues for incensed women" written by Christine Brückner and translated by Eleanor Bron. It's a collection of imaginary speeches by a variety of women, both mythological, historical and from literature, so you get, among others, Desdemona (if she'd actually talked with Othello and he'd heared her out, uninterrupted), Luther's wife Katharina, and Christiane the long time mistress and eventual wife of Goethe. It's a funny and poignant text, no longer than a short story, and the other speeches are great as well.
The opera, otoh, changes this so that Lotte is unquestioningly in love with Werther, is only with Albert because her mother wished that with her dying breath and her father wants it as well, and Albert turns into a domestic tyrant who forbids Lotte Werther's company once they're married.
Aw, man, of course it does, it's a 19th C opera. Grrrr. Okay... maybe I should check out the opera before reading it, I'm less likely to be really irritated :) (Argh, and this reminds me I actually picked up the Faust translation you recommended and it's been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, just waiting to be read! I have a lot on my list, okay.) On the other hand... that clip reminds me I would probably just go anywhere for Jonas Kaufmann, aaaaaah.
On the other hand, Lego Werther was hilarious! And the trailers are very pretty :)
I empathize re: Jonas Kaufmann, whom I saw live on the stage three times.
The guy who did the Lego Werther by now did over 300 lego summaries of works of literature in German, and has started doing English versions as well, like this one, so I can link you to Lego Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, the Schiller play I told you about which is also a lesser known Verdi opera named Luisa Miller and features Lady Milford and the scene that more than any other got Schiller the undying enmity of his Duke, Carl Eugen (married to Wilhelmine's daughter), the one about forcible recruitment to the US, here.
He also did Schiller's Don Carlos, but not yet in English. If you want to tackle the German version: Lego Don Carlos.
Ahhhh I'm not going to be able to follow it in German at all (I could get the refrains in the musical if they were short and they repeated them slowly, but only because I had the translation right there :P ), but if he ever does Don Carlos in English let me know, because these are hilarious :D
(Oh! And mildred pointed out to me that I might be able to watch German DVDs in one way or another, so I have German DVDs of this production now, which looks like it could be interestingly regie. But I have been too busy to actually try to figure out how to watch it *facepalm*
And hey, one of the two Amazon reviews says this production mostly kept the original text (not always the case in Regietheater) and made the viewer empathize with Philip instead of just Posa and Carlos, and that Elisabeth comes across as whip smart, so it should be up your alley...
That review, uh, may have been the thing that made me pull the trigger on it :D One day I'll have the time to try to figure out how to play it *rolls eyes at self*
Heee. I knew saying I hadn't read a work of German literature would result in a summary of said work of literature!
Your write-up is greatly appreciated, though because of limited salon participation I alas have to leave it at that. Though I see cahn is making the most of it, so yay!
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timeasmymeasure
All About Werther
Date: 2021-01-29 08:28 am (UTC)Back to good old Werther: being an 18th century novel, it mostly consists of letters. (With fake editorial comments.) (Reminder: Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" and "Pamela" are probably the most famous letter-novels in English of the era; Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote "Julie, or the New Heloise" as his entry to the genre; and then of course there's "Les Liasons Dangereuses" by Chloderos de Laclos. Plus of course now we know Voltaire created his own letter novel. *g*) Said letters are written by our titular hero to his childhood bff Wilhelm. Now, there are two rl inspirations for what unfolds. One was young Goethe - supposed to study the law, but not too keen on that because he knows he's more into writing already - coming to a German small town, Wetzlar, falling in love with Charlotte Buff who is already engaged, being friends with her and her fiance and then husband for a while while flirting a lot and then departing from Wetzlar, to fall in love with another married woman next. (He kept in letter writing contact with Charlotte and her husband for some more years, though.) The other inspiration is that while Goethe was hanging out with Charlotte, he also met, in the same town, a young guy with the last name of Jerusalem. Who was in love with a married woman as well (not Charlotte Buff), only unlike Goethe did not fall out of it again but committed suicide, with pistols he borrowed from Kestner, Charlotte Buff's husband, who wrote about the whole affair to Goethe (who by then was back in Frankfurt.) Now Goethe hadn't been great friends with Jerusalem, but he'd known him, and the coincidence, the might-have-been was eerie, and out of the combination of these two events grew the idea of a novel. (Mind you, said novel ended his friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Kestner, because naming the heroine "Lotte", using a lot of autobiographical incidents and mixing them with the Jerusalem tale did not strike them as cool.)
Werther in the novel, unlike Goethe, isn't a writer, he has Jerusalem's job(s), but he meets Lotte the way Goethe met Charlotte Buff (the scene subsequently became much imitated and parodied, hilariously by Thackeray in a limerick) - mutual aquaintances pick her up for a countryside ball at her father's house (nobody is a noble here, so shared carriages are a thing for money saving purposes), where because she's the oldest sister and her mother is dead she's still busy cutting bread and butter for her kid siblings for dinner before rushing off to the ball. She and Werther then hit it off over loving the same poetry - Klopstock - and having a sneaky fondness for trashy English novels, dance, and he falls in love with her while learning she's engaged. After some more weeks of hanging out together and enjoying literature and hiking (this is the era where the middle class discovers taking strolls through landscapes as a hobby), her fiance Albert shows up, and Werther tries to be fair: Albert is a good guy who loves Lotte. Werther attempts to do the sensible thing and leave after one more evening with Lotte and Albert (on Goethe's real life birthday, August 28th), taking a position elsewhere as an envoy's secretary.
However, the elsewhere doesn't work out, not least because it's a court and Werther is a non-noble and gets snubbed by the nobility. He quits and returns to the small town where Lotte and Albert are now married. Now Werther has given up being fair to Albert and sees him in a far more critical light (this is also where Kestner wrote an "WTF, Goethe?!?" letter when reading that part of the novel in protest), as someone who takes Lotte for granted and doesn't appreciate her enough. Lotte and Werther geeking out about literature is still a thing, but now he's into Ossian. (Cue subsequent readers, aware that the Ossian poems were a fraud, wondering whether Goethe is doing this to signal Werther's mental decline. Since Goethe himself didn't known yet when writing that the poems were a fraud, probably not.) Events come to a head in a kiss after which she tells him to leave, and he commits suicide the way rl Jerusalem did. Then we get the famous last sentence of the novel (from the supposed editor of the letters) stating that Werther, as a suicide, was buried outside the town. "Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." (This in is contemporary context is a wham last line managing to depict the treatment of suicides by the clergy of both main faiths as heartless without ever saying so.)
Now, what made this novel such a big bestseller at the time (and inspired a Werther fashion craze, with young men wearing the outfit Werther wears when first meeting Lotte and young women Lotte's dress, not to mention the infamous Werther style suicides) wasn't the plot as such, it was the language, the immediacy of feeling (remember, in theatre, French formalism still ruled absolutely), the nature descriptions (aside from this being a life long interest of Goethe's, he pulls out all the stops of being a young gifted writer here), the novelty that the characters and what they experience aren't nobles (aside from Werther's brief stint as an envoy's secretary, which is summed up in a letter to Wilhelm), they're people you could actually meet, and there's no villain (even when critical about Albert as a husband, the worst Werther can accuse him of smugness and self satisfaction). Also, while the letter format was the most popular format for novels at the time, somehow the Werther-to-Wilhelm letters really struck a nerve, feeling authentic to many a reader in a way the other letter-novels didn't. The preamble of the novel, addressing the reader and saying that if for some reason life hadn't granted them a friend, they should regard this book as that friend, even heightened the identification.
It certainly worked this way for Karl Philip Moritz, who unlike Goethe had an upbringing more like Fritz', only the lower class version - his father was a tyrannical super religious military man, he went through a horrid abusive school, then a horrid abusive master (he was supposed to become a hatmaker), when he ran away. For Moritz, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" became what music and literature were for Fritz, he regarded the book as his friend, and of course he fanboyed the author. Now, this could have gone horribly wrong - not a few people who loved "Werther" were irritated to disappointed to crushed when meeting Goethe later in life, when he hadn't just moved on stylistically but also was a courtier and minister (of Carl August, remember), not to mention sharp tongued if he wanted to be. But Moritz lucked out, for he met Goethe when Goethe was on his two years "finding myself again as a poet" runaway time in Italy, and Goethe wasn't just kind to him but memorably described Moritz as "my damaged younger brother", seeing in him a might have been if he hadn't lucked out by being born the son of a wealthy Frankfurt citizen and given all the advantages from that, so Moritz from this point onwards had connections and job security. He still died young (his health was wrecked), and left German literature with the haunting autobiographical novel "Anton Reiser" which is perhaps the first German literary text to astutely describe psychological abuse through childhood and youth, and the long term damage resulting from this. "Anton Reiser" also contains a description of the narrator reading "Werther" for the first time, and "I'm not alone anymore! Here's someone who feels as I do!" is very much a part of it.
Another famous Werther fan was Napoleon, who read it dozens of times (in translation, of course), wrote a bad imitative novel as a young man as a result, and upon his meeting with Goethe had a "Han shot first" type of conversation with him. (There are two versions of the novel; the later edition contains some more editorial comments and more stuff about Werther's job frustrations, possibly because the author by then was working at the Weimar court. Napoleon liked the original version with minimal fake editorial comments better.) For today's readers, coming to the novel from a completely different context than later 18th century readers, the impact is basically impossible to reproduce. However, there's a very good 1970s novel by Ulrich Plenzdorf, "Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.", in which the hero, Edgar Wibeau, comes across the novel by accident and mocks everything about it, only to find himself in a plot where basically everything that happened to Werther happens to him, and he comes to understand Werther more and more. Instead of letters, the novel consists of transcriptions of tape recordings as Edgar speaks his thoughts on tape for his buddy Willy.) It's an East German novel which also has to get around GDR censorship - for example, Edgar as a drop out instead of a young man eager to join the work force had to be presented in a way that didn't glorify hippiedom (that's something for decadent Westerners!), and no sympathetic hero of a novel licensed by GDR censorship could be allowed to commit suicide (in a worker's paradise? No way!), which with the death being quintessential to the plot was a problem. However, Plenzdorf got around censorship in style - Edgar is perfectly willing to join the work force, just in a way that puts his ability to good use, so after his firing from the equivalent of the secretary-to-an-envoy situation (this is working as part of a a handymen's unit), he is busy secretly inventing and building a machine to help the handymen's unit with painting that's supposed to prove to them his abilities, and it's this invention being badly haywired that gets him killed after his night-plus-ensueing-goodbye with Charlie; he doesn't commit deliberately suicide. However, the subtext of him just risking it because he doesn't see a point anymore is quite strong.
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-01-30 06:06 am (UTC)I know in the English speaking world, that entire period of German literature is swept up under the label "Romantic", but that drives every German literature teacher crazy.
This is good to know, because yeah, this is what I have heard. But now I know :)
Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" and "Pamela" are probably the most famous letter-novels in English of the era; Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote "Julie, or the New Heloise" as his entry to the genre
Oh! I haven't read these but I know them from Pushkin mentioning them in Eugene Onegin :D (Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?) Everything is starting to make sense :P
(He kept in letter writing contact with Charlotte and her husband for some more years, though.)
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
not least because it's a court and Werther is a non-noble and gets snubbed by the nobility.
I suppose this isn't fair to Jerusalem, but I find this hilarious given what you've told us about Goethe and Carl August.
(this is also where Kestner wrote an "WTF, Goethe?!?" letter when reading that part of the novel in protest)
Aw, man. I can see why Kestner was not amused.
"Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." (This in is contemporary context is a wham last line managing to depict the treatment of suicides by the clergy of both main faiths as heartless without ever saying so.)
Ohhhhh, I see. (And this is the kind of thing I am really glad you are telling me!)
The preamble of the novel, addressing the reader and saying that if for some reason life hadn't granted them a friend, they should regard this book as that friend, even heightened the identification.
Even though the Kestner thing still annoys me, this is actually rather touching to me.
However, Plenzdorf got around censorship in style
Wow, yeah, I like that.
Thank you for this! I shall put it on my (sadly extremely large) stack of things to read :D Though I am thinking that I should read a biography of Goethe first (not that you haven't been awfully helpful with that too), as knowing a bit about Voltaire beforehand certainly helped a lot with Candide :)
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-01-30 10:50 am (UTC)While I'm providing links: Lego Werther, a hilarious summary of the novel in English.
A beautiful trailer advertising a theatre production (all the spoken text is directly from the novel)
Another trailer, quoting directly from the letter Werther writers after his first encounter with Lotte and showing the locations in Wetzlar (there was A LOT of Werther tourism in the late 18th and then in the 19th century because Goethe had described the locations for the various scenes very recognizably, which was another thing that the Kestners weren't thrilled about)
Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?
They do!
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
Well, quite. Thomas Mann wrote a novel called "Lotte in Weimar" about Charlotte Kestner, nee Buff, visiting Weimar 44 years later and basically closing that chapter of her life with one last meeting. By then, she's on the one hand treated by all the Weimar society as a walking, talking bit of literature which both flatters and irritates her, but on the other avoided by Goethe; their one meeting in public is inconclusive and she's dissappointed that he's now so formal and a walking, talking institution, but then they meet again in a carriage and have a real conversation, allowing her to make peace with the past. It's a famous novel (also filmed) but has one problem, and that's Thomas Mann basically writing Goethe as himself. (He very much saw himself as the new Goethe in his life time.) And they were different people with different tempers, to put it simply. (His version is why avid Thomas-Mann-reader Susan Sontag, in her novel about Sir William Hamilton in which Goethe has a cameo showing up in Italy where he meets Sir William and Emma, writes Goethe as Thomas Mann, too,)
Biography of Goethe: postpone that, not just because there is so much else to read, but also because he lived a very long and rich life, and also I don't know which English language biography is good. Otoh, there is a short text available in English which I just ordered for you (also just in case my calendar doesn't arrive), which is one of the "incensed monologues for incensed women" written by Christine Brückner and translated by Eleanor Bron. It's a collection of imaginary speeches by a variety of women, both mythological, historical and from literature, so you get, among others, Desdemona (if she'd actually talked with Othello and he'd heared her out, uninterrupted), Luther's wife Katharina, and Christiane the long time mistress and eventual wife of Goethe. It's a funny and poignant text, no longer than a short story, and the other speeches are great as well.
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-10 06:19 am (UTC)Aw, man, of course it does, it's a 19th C opera. Grrrr. Okay... maybe I should check out the opera before reading it, I'm less likely to be really irritated :) (Argh, and this reminds me I actually picked up the Faust translation you recommended and it's been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, just waiting to be read! I have a lot on my list, okay.) On the other hand... that clip reminds me I would probably just go anywhere for Jonas Kaufmann, aaaaaah.
On the other hand, Lego Werther was hilarious! And the trailers are very pretty :)
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-10 12:05 pm (UTC)The guy who did the Lego Werther by now did over 300 lego summaries of works of literature in German, and has started doing English versions as well, like this one, so I can link you to Lego Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, the Schiller play I told you about which is also a lesser known Verdi opera named Luisa Miller and features Lady Milford and the scene that more than any other got Schiller the undying enmity of his Duke, Carl Eugen (married to Wilhelmine's daughter), the one about forcible recruitment to the US, here.
He also did Schiller's Don Carlos, but not yet in English. If you want to tackle the German version: Lego Don Carlos.
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-12 05:28 am (UTC)Ahhhh I'm not going to be able to follow it in German at all (I could get the refrains in the musical if they were short and they repeated them slowly, but only because I had the translation right there :P ), but if he ever does Don Carlos in English let me know, because these are hilarious :D
(Oh! And mildred pointed out to me that I might be able to watch German DVDs in one way or another, so I have German DVDs of this production now, which looks like it could be interestingly regie. But I have been too busy to actually try to figure out how to watch it *facepalm*
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-12 06:10 am (UTC)And hey, one of the two Amazon reviews says this production mostly kept the original text (not always the case in Regietheater) and made the viewer empathize with Philip instead of just Posa and Carlos, and that Elisabeth comes across as whip smart, so it should be up your alley...
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-13 05:58 pm (UTC)Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-01-30 01:12 pm (UTC)Your write-up is greatly appreciated, though because of limited salon participation I alas have to leave it at that. Though I see