Lotte in Weimar

This article is about Thomas Mann's novel. For the film adaptation of the novel, see Lotte in Weimar (film) .

Lotte in Weimar is a cheerful novel by Thomas Mann about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Charlotte Kestner, who is 44 years old and widowed , was born. Buff from Wetzlar , the real role model for Lotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther , traveledto Weimar in 1816 , ostensibly to visit her sister, but actually in the hope of seeing Goethe again.

According to Thomas Mann's diary, the work was created between November 11, 1936 and October 25, 1939.

First print from 1939 with original publisher's cover

The work

In the stagecoach that stops in front of the Gasthof Zum Elephanten , the first house on the square, Charlotte Kestner arrives early one September morning with her daughter and maid in Weimar. Her reputation of being the archetype of Lotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther , the most successful novel of an era, has accompanied her over the decades.

As soon as it arrives, it is seized. The enthusiastic and quotation-resistant waiter Mager steals her time with his talkativeness. She is then harassed by a young Irish draftswoman ( Charlotte will later call her a errant bungler ) who has specialized in sketching celebrities. And then a lot of visitors give each other the handle. You want - or have to - speak about Goethe in front of the visitor: Dr. Riemer , the former private tutor of Goethe's son August , requests an interview. Then Adele Schopenhauer , who is close to Goethe's house, urgently asks to be allowed to audition. Finally, Goethe's son arrives. All of their lives - as well as Lotte's - had a profound influence on Goethe, and not always with happiness.

Formally very elegant, the 67-year-old Goethe is initially only reflected in the Goethe image of his surroundings. The reader gets to know him very late, only in the seventh chapter. Goethe just woke up. After perceiving the dawn of the day, he lets his thoughts run free. The loosened associations and fragments of thoughts result in a kind of inner monologue that is only interrupted when Goethe speaks to his domestic servants.

His son brings him the news of Charlotte's arrival. Goethe reacted angrily "Konnt 'she's not resist the old, and not spare me's?" . He decides - the news of Charlotte's arrival has spread throughout the city at lightning speed - to invite her and her daughter to a larger group. In this round table you can feel oppressively how a genius can weigh on his surroundings. The host feels obliged to entertain his guests with anecdotes and improvised chatter. Goethe quotes a Chinese proverb: "The great man is a public misfortune." The reaction to this supposed absurdity is demonstrative laughter.

In private - as was Charlotte's wish - Goethe does not speak to her on this occasion. And there was no further meeting with Charlotte during her stay of several weeks, not even when Goethe made it possible for her to go to the theater shortly before her departure. He has his servant Carl bring them to the performance in his carriage and pick them up again. During the return trip, in the dark interior of the car and contemplating the theatrical experience, a play that artistically surely and in no way exceeded the limits of humanity , and now wondering what the limits of humanity are, she says in a kind of waking dream , Goethe is sitting next to her. The following dream conversation with him comforts her over the cool round table. Thomas Mann paraphrases the flame imagery of the Divan poem Blessed Sehnsucht . Like a parable, Goethe sees the poet in the novel as a butterfly who burns in the “deadly luring flame” of art, sacrificing “ life and body” “for spiritual change” . Lotte, more matter-of-factly, compares their two fates: “There is something terrible about the atrophy, I tell you! And we little ones have to avoid it and oppose it with all our strength. Even if the head is shaking from the exertion. [...] With you, it was different. [...] Your real thing [your life's work], it looks like something. Not after renunciation and unfaithfulness, but after pure fulfillment and highest loyalty. ”
With the prospect of a reunion in the hereafter - “ what a friendly moment it will be when we one day wake up again ” and a whispered “ Peace to your old age! ” Fades away voice heard early . Charlotte wakes up and the carriage stops where the novel began: in front of the Gasthof Zum Elephanten .

main characters

The waiter lean

Both the first and the last sentence of the novel apply to him: “The waiter at the Gasthof Zum Elephanten in Weimar, Mager, an educated man, had a moving, joyfully confusing experience on an almost summery day in September 1816. "

And at the end it says: “Frau Hofratsin”, he greets Charlotte, “welcome as always! Would you like to have spent an uplifting evening in our temple of the Muses! Can I offer this arm for safe support? Good heavens, Frau Hofratin, I have to say it: helping Werther's Lotte out of Goethe's car is an experience - what should I call it? It's worth booking. "

Skinny is the not unappealing caricature of the literary enthusiast . The author introduces him as an "educated man". But his leitmotif recurring linguistic blunder "worth booking" reminds of the uneducated Ms. Stöhr in Der Zauberberg . He stands for the questionable side of fame, for "the shallowness of those" who prepare the fame. When, in the first chapter, he finally leaves the newly arrived court councilor alone in her inn room and no longer speaks to her, he has to turn on the threshold to ask one last question, the naive question about the biographical authenticity of Werther's parting words.

Councilor Charlotte Kestner, b. Buff

Lotte has been carrying around with her , and has been for forty-four years, "an agonizing riddle" , an "unbalanced, agonizing account ." Lotte calls the riddle, the unpaid bill by name: "Poet - Frugality" . [...] "Frugality with shadow images" , "Frugality of poetry" , finally even "Frugality of the kiss, from which, as he [Goethe] says, no children grow".

An additional "third party" was the young man Goethe, who as "the dear participant" attached himself equally to her and her good fiancé. "He came from outside and settled down on these well-prepared living conditions" [...] "was in love with our betrothal" .

Offended, it reinforced with the head shaking, a geriatric diseases, the 63-year-old lamented: "In a made nest" had he put his feeling "the odd one" . You can find no other word for it than - "parasitism" . It was about "the love of a bride" for the young poet, the bride of another. For forty-four years this "frugality" remained a mystery to her.

Doctor Riemer

The philologist Doctor Riemer was tutor of Goethe's son August. After that, Goethe knew how to continue to bind him to himself so that he could fall back on the doctor's lexical erudition at any time. Doctor Riemer seems to be lacking independence and energetic energy. He is a friend of the extended morning nap and recently turned down an appointment at the University of Rostock.

Goethe fell into "lifelong bondage". "A somewhat morose, quasi-grumbling train lay around his mouth". He projects his relationship with Goethe onto the visitor, probably not without good reason. He considers Charlotte Kestner and himself to be "complicit in agony".

With an urgent need to communicate, he speaks admiringly about Goethe - but then he begins to complain more and more about the coldness that emanates from the great.

In well-placed words and sophisticated diction, Doctor Riemer reports on Goethe's nihilistic equanimity, which contrasts so strangely with his personal appeal. Talking himself more and more confused, finally the Goethe-addicted - citing a remark from him - compares the poem with a kiss given to the world and breaks off.

"He was pale, there were drops of sweat on his forehead, his bovine eyes were staring, and his open mouth, whose otherwise munching expression had become more like the expression of a tragic mask, was breathing heavily, quickly and audibly."

August von Goethe and Ottilie von Pogwisch

Goethe's son August, twenty-seven years old and councilor of the Grand Duke, is also employed by his father as a secretary and assistant. August is not allowed to decide for himself. Among other things, his father forbade him to participate as a volunteer in the skirmishes in the liberation war against Napoleon, which earned him the contempt of his contemporaries. However, Goethe does not object to his son's drinking habits, nor to his dealings with women of dubious reputations.

Goethe's son appears in the sixth chapter. He comes on behalf of the father to greet those who have arrived and to verbally deliver an invitation to lunch “in a small group”. However, it should only take place in three days. The table party will consist of twelve people.

Despite some striking differences, Charlotte is touched by the similarity between the son and Goethe of her youth. August, on the other hand, recognizes in the aged features of Charlotte the young girl of yore, who probably corresponded to a type, petite, blonde and blue-eyed, who is repeated in Ottilie von Pogwisch. Referring to the strange correspondence, August says that Charlotte could be “Ottilie's mother” or even her “sister”.

Ottilie is now the daughter of an impoverished lady-in-waiting of the Grand Duchess Luise in Weimar. Goethe, widowed for a year, would like the "little person" (as he jokingly calls Ottilie) to become his daughter-in-law. They and August should live as a married couple on the upper floor of his house. Goethe would have the lively, distinctive Ottilie around him every day.

After a one-to-one conversation with Goethe, about which she persistently remains silent, Ottilie decides to marry August. About that momentous conversation with Goethe she only reveals to her friend Adele Schopenhauer: "Let the news suffice for you that he was charming to me."

Charlotte sees through the deputy role that the old man in love assigns to his son. Nevertheless - or maybe because of that - she speaks to August: "If you can suffer, you young people, take yourselves, do it for his sake and be happy in your upper rooms."

The Goethe portrait

The young Goethe, Lotte remembers, that was “the great boy” who stole a kiss from her. What a strange person he had been, "baroque at times, probably of character, in some pieces not at all pleasant, but so full of genius and peculiarly moving peculiarity." He had courted Lotte back then. But she had decided in favor of her good Hans Christian, who had older rights than the third person who was added. “Not only because love and loyalty were stronger than temptation, but also because of a deeply felt horror at the mystery in the being of the other” , this “monster without purpose and peace”. How strange it is that a monster could be so kind and honest, such a well-behaved boy [...] » .

Doctor Riemer calls Goethe's tolerance a laxity that arises from indifference and disregard. And yet human love was also included, so that love and contempt entered into a connection in this tolerance that reminds one of the divine. Thinking in mythological categories, the philologist assigns the "Sigillum of Godhead" to Goethe .

Thomas Mann lets Doctor Riemer drive the apotheosis of the poet's genius further and further: "Newly creating a word has a smiling enchanted meaning" in Goethe's poetry, "it flows over into the cheerful and ghostly quality". Goethe shows that poetry is "the incarnation of the divine" . And yet there is a peculiar coldness, a devastating equanimity, from its nature. This "comprehensive irony" , as Doctor Riemer calls this attitude, means "that terrifying approach to the divine-diabolical which we call" greatness "."

The eloquent, sharp-eyed Adele Schopenhauer , who informed Charlotte about the gossip in the small royal seat, reports, among other things, on Goethe's attitude towards Napoleon . Napoleon had received Goethe in Erfurt. «Since Erfurt there has been a person-to-person relationship between him and Caesar. The latter had treated him on an equal footing, so to speak, and the master may have gained the certainty that he had nothing to fear from him for his intellectual realm, his Germanness, that Napoleon's genius was not the enemy of his. " Goethe hoped from Napoleon that “a united Europe could enjoy peace under his scepter” .

In the ninth and last chapter, Lotte, writing to one of her sons, sums up: «Just this much, I made a new acquaintance with an old man who, if I didn't know that it was Goethe, and still, would not make a pleasant impression on me " in " his stiff way " . Thomas Mann quotes from a historical letter (self-comment by Thomas Mann on June 18, 1951 to Charlotte Kestner, a descendant of the eponymous heroine).

Autobiographical references

Thomas Mann's portrait of Goethe is in many ways also self-analysis. Man felt himself related to Goethe. In the autobiographical text The Origin of Doctor Faustus (1949) he reports that he wrote “ Lotte's best chapters in Weimar [...] among the inexperienced and indescribable torments of an infectious sciatica that lasted for over half a year” . "After nights that God save me from repetition, [...] and in some inclined sitting at my desk, I then performed the Unio mystica with Him, 'the star of the most beautiful height'". The fact that Mann puts sentences in Goethe's mouth that corresponded to his own thoughts on National Socialism shows his intense identification with the main character of his novel.

Doctor Riemer remarks to Charlotte Kestner that one often hears statements from Goethe "which already contain the contradiction to oneself, - whether for the sake of the truth or from a kind of faithlessness and - owls." Thomas Mann: "Well, what of the juggler in me - and in the artist man in general - I denounced early on, and sat humorous about it in judgment [...]. "

Historical background

Message from Goethe dated October
9, 1816 to Charlotte Kestner

Charlotte Kestner's stay in Weimar, 44 years after the publication of Werther, is historically guaranteed. “In his diary on September 25th of that year, Goethe mentions very briefly and dryly: 'Midday Ridels and Madame Kestner from Hanover'. Only Charlotte's relatives, with whom she had arrived on September 22, were actually invited to lunch. She stayed with them and not, as I said, in the Gasthaus zum Elephanten. Lunch took place only in this narrow circle and was not a dinner for sixteen people, as I have described. Charlotte Kestner was not accompanied by her older daughter Charlotte, but by a younger one named Clara. [...] The ticket that Charlotte sent from the Elephant to Goethe after her arrival was made up by me. "

In the possession of the Leipzig University Library there is a message from Goethe's hand to Charlotte Kestner: “May [the novel means 'if'] you, dear friend, help yourself to my box tonight, my car will pick you up. No tickets are required. My servant shows the way through the ground floor. Forgive me if I do not find myself, and I have not yet let me see for myself whether my thoughts have been with you the same number of times. Warmly wishing the best - Goethe. Wd October 9, 1816 "

To the reception of the novel

As with all of Mann's works, it was banned in Germany until the end of Nazi rule , after the UK's chief prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross at the end of his closing argument on July 27, 1946 , the book became the subject of special interest in connection with the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals in 1946 unwittingly issued passages from the novel as quotations from Goethe:

"Many years ago Goethe said of the German people that one day their fate would overtake it:

Fate will beat them because they betrayed themselves and didn't want to be what they are. It is disgusting that they do not know the charm of the truth, that mist and smoke and berserking excesses are so dear to them. That they devote themselves faithfully to every crazy villain who calls out their lowest, encourages them in their vices and teaches them to understand nationality as isolation and brutality is miserable.

What a prophetic voice he spoke in - for these are the insane villains who did these very things. "

The prosecutor did not name the source of the quote. A week later it became known that it was taken from the Goethe monologue of Chapter 7 from Thomas Mann's novel “Lotte in Weimar”, where it reads as follows:

Fate will beat them because they betrayed themselves and didn't want to be what they are. That they do not know the charm of the truth is to be lamented, that mist and intoxication and all over-the- counter excesses are so dear to them, is repugnant. That they are each ecstatic surrender rogue believer who calls her Lowest she encouraged in their vices and teaches them to understand nationality as insulation and brutality, [...] is miserable.

Shawcross had reproduced yet another passage from Chapter 7 in his plea by expressing the hope that he would like it at the very end

"Those other words of Goethe become action, not only, as we hope, for the German people, but for all of humanity:

This is how the Germans should do it ... receiving and giving the world, their hearts open to every fruitful admiration, great through understanding and love, through mediocrity and spirit - this is how they should be, that is their destiny.

The London daily Times , which printed excerpts from Shawcross' plea on July 29, 1946, later pointed out his error again in its literature supplement ( Times Literary Supplement October 12, 1946). The Süddeutsche Zeitung dealt with the matter in its July 30, 1946 edition.

Thomas Mann 1937. Photo by Carl van Vechten

“In official London circles,” as Thomas Mann later wrote in “The Origin of Doctor Faustus”, the message “that Shawcross did not quote Goethe but my novel ... mild embarrassment”. On August 16, 1946, in exile in California, Thomas Mann received a letter from the British ambassador in Washington with the request “for clarification. In my answer I admitted that the Times were right, that it was a mystification well intended by its authors. But I vouched for myself that if Goethe had not really said what the prosecutor had put in his mouth, he could very well have said it, and in a higher sense Sir Hartley had quoted correctly after all . "Mann admitted, however having "caused strange confusion (...)" and that the matter remains "an embarrassing occurrence". It is still uncertain whether Erika Mann , Thomas Mann's daughter, who attended the trial as a press observer, played a role in clearing up Shawcross' error. Thomas Mann wrote the following about its creation in the "Origin of Doctor Faustus":

Even during the war, individual copies of the novel, smuggled in from Switzerland, had been circulating in Germany, and haters of the regime had learned from the great monologue of the Seventh Chapter, in which the authentic and the verifiable are indistinguishable from the Apocrypha, albeit linguistically and spiritually well matched mixed, pulled out individual diktas that were very close to the German character and prophesying disaster, reproduced them and distributed them as a leaflet under the camouflage title “From Goethe's Conversations with Riemer”. A copy of it or the translation of the peculiar falsum had been put before the British Prosecutor ... and, in good faith, seduced by the striking end of the utterances, he had made extensive statements of it in his plaid.

The German public received the “charge of Goethe against the Germans” with mixed echoes: some saw the quote as an accurate description of the mentality during the Nazi years and ultimately justified criticism, others saw Shawcross' mishap as evidence that the Nuremberg trial “ Victory justice ”and a“ staged performance ”with a predetermined outcome.

In the 1960s a similar debate was sparked off by the admission of the monologizing Roman-Goethe: "I have never heard of a crime that I could not have committed." In Goethe himself, in the maxims and reflections , only: “One can only grow old to be milder; I do not see any mistake being made that I would not have made. ”However, also:“ The doer is always unscrupulous; nobody has a conscience but the observer. "The Salzburger Volksblatt and the Deutsche National-Zeitung and Soldatenzeitung wrote in 1965 of a" pathetic fraud ":" Man faked Goethe in an anti-German sense "[27. August 1965]. Louis Glatt called Mann's formulation in 1966 an “unworthy assassination attempt on the spiritual and moral figure of Goethe” (“On the authenticity of a Goethe quotation from Thomas Mann”, in: “New series of the yearbook of the Goethe Society” of August 28, 1966, p. 310-314).

filming

The DEFA filmed the novel in 1975 as Lotte in Weimar . Directed by Egon Günther , Lilli Palmer took on the role of Lotte, while Martin Hellberg played Goethe.

expenditure

• Thomas Mann: Lotte in Weimar. Novel . Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1939 (first edition)
• Thomas Mann: Lotte in Weimar. Text and comment. Large annotated Frankfurt edition in two volumes. Published by Werner Frizen . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, text volume ISBN 3-10-048336-7 , commentary volume ISBN 3-10-048335-9 .

literature

• Stefan Zweig : Thomas Mann, “Lotte in Weimar” , in: Reviews 1902–1939. Encounters with books . 1983 ( E-Text )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Charlotte's stay in Weimar lasted from deep in September (1st chapter) to around mid-October 1816 (9th chapter)
2. ↑ There is ample evidence that that conversation in the carriage, contrary to opinions to the contrary, cannot be imagined as real . On the one hand, Thomas Mann himself emphasizes in his letter of May 28, 1951 to Henry Hatfield that it is definitely a ghost talk, a dream of Lotte, who has come out of the theater, who is forced by itself, something like a novel to give happy ending . In addition, the wording of the novel on the first three pages of the ninth chapter does not allow any other reading: Charlotte stayed in Weimar until mid-October [...] We don't know too much about the stay of the famous woman in the equally famous city ; [...] it was also mainly devoted to being together with dear relatives, so we hear of several smaller and even a few larger invitations, which she attended in a friendly manner during these weeks, and which took place in various social circles of the residence. [...] She never saw her friend von Wetzlar again at any of these exits. [...] But even her childhood friend wrote to her once, almost to her surprise, during these weeks and asked her to use his carriage for the evening of the theater on October 9th. The appearance and voice of Goethe in the carriage arise from Lotte's imagination, even if the content of the conversation (especially Goethe's artistic credo expressed in it) does not correspond to her perspective, but rather to that of the author Thomas Mann.
3. ↑ Thomas Mann has Goethe quote himself here. The final sentence of the novel The Elective Affinities is almost identical: what a pleasant moment it will be when they one day wake up again.
4. ↑ “Stiff Art” can refer to Goethe's formality as well as to his way of moving. Goethe's trunk motility was limited in this phase of life by an osseous adhesion of eight thoracic vertebrae [T 5 –12]. To this end, five ribs on the right [T 6 -10], which are normally connected to the associated vertebrae by joints, were consolidated by ossification of these joints with the respective vertebral bodies. Cf. Ullrich, Herbert: Goethe's skeleton - Goethe's figure. In: Goethe-Jahrbuch 2006, pp. 167–187
5. ↑ p. 11; on "Star of the Most Beautiful Height" cf. Dorothea Hölscher-Lohmeyer: Johann Wolfgang Goethe p. 112 in the Google book search
6. ↑ and were later quoted in the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals, see below in the Reception section
7. ↑ in view of the antinomies of life
8. ↑ on December 29, 1953 to Hans Mayer
9. ↑ on June 18, 1951 to Charlotte Kestner, great-great-granddaughter of Charlotte Kestner, b. Buff
10. ↑ Catalog of the exhibition "450 Years of Leipzig University Library 1543–1993, 2nd edition, p. 78 with ill."
11. ↑ The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Nuremberg November 14, 1945 - October 1, 1946. Vol. 19, Nuremberg 1948, p. 592. http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/M/Der+N%C3%BCrnberger+Proze%C3%9F/ Main negotiations / one hundred and eighty-eighth + day. + Saturday, + 27 + July + 1946 / morning session
12. ↑ The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Nuremberg November 14, 1945 - October 1, 1946. Vol. 19, Nuremberg 1948, p. 593. http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/M/Der+N%C3%BCrnberger+Proze%C3%9F/ Main negotiations / one hundred and eighty-eighth + day. + Saturday, + 27 + July + 1946 / morning session
13. ^ Letter to Viktor Mann dated October 4, 1946
14. ↑ http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Aphorismen+und+Aufzüge/Maximen+und+Reflexionen/Aus+%C2%BBKunst+und+Altertum%C2%AB/F% C3% BCnften + volume + first + issue. + 1824
15. ↑ Lotte in Weimar. Text and comment. Large annotated Frankfurt edition in two volumes. Comment from Werner Frizen. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-10-048335-9 , p. 171
16. ↑ Lotte in Weimar on progress-film.de ( Memento from October 2, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : Lotte in Weimar  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikiversity: "Lotte in Weimar": Concept and bibliography of the first printing.  - course materials

• Goethe rises from the pedestal To comment New edition by Lotte in Weimar - Interview with the editor Werner Frizen