Wertheriads
As Wertheriaden refers to works that follows the example of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther oriented. The productive reception of the text sets in immediately after its publication in 1774 and manifests itself not only in literary genres (poetry, drama, prose), but also in the areas of opera, song and later film.
Historical background
The Sorrows of Young Werther was Goethe's greatest public success. At the time of its publication, the novel met the lifestyle of its generation. The “dangerous extreme of the sentimental character” ( Friedrich Schiller : On naive and sentimental poetry ) described therein met with immense interest in Sturm und Drang . The text not only stimulated critical reception. Shortly after its publication, the contemporary book market was flooded by a wide variety of rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.
It was a form of articulation of Weltschmerz or melancholy , which manifested itself in the form of the vanitas mood in literature at least since the baroque era . The motif of the " sickness to death " (Kierkegaard) came from this tradition. Since the age of sensitivity , exaggerated individuality and even narcissism have been able to articulate themselves more openly. In addition to art, the imitation of the Werther figure led to a series of suicides or suicide attempts, which is now known as the Werther effect .
What was new and sensational was that Werther's suicide was no longer tabooed as a sin, but as "free death" was publicly moved into the realm of individual freedom that was allowed to assert itself against social constraints.
variants
One of the best-known early Wertheriads is Christoph Friedrich Nicolais Freuden des Junge Werther (1775) as an enlightening counter to Werther's excessive, destructive emotionality.
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz was able to make friends more strongly with the emotionality of the Werther figure: The forest brother , a counterpart to Werther's suffering . This epistolary novel - here the Werther figure bears the name "Heart" - was written in 1776, but was only published in 1797 by Goethe, who at times himself planned a continuation of his novel expanded to include the history of his hero.
The reception of The Sorrows of Young Werther extended early on to other European countries. The first French translation appeared in 1775. Transmissions into other languages followed, which also resulted in redesigns, for example in Italian by Ugo Foscolo's Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1799), but above all in the French-speaking area, where in addition to Chateaubriand's René (1802) also Constants Adolphe. Anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d'un inconnu, et publiée (1806, published 1816) and Senancours Oberman. Lettres publiées par M. Senancour (1804) document an intense reception.
Napoléon Bonaparte congratulated Goethe in 1808 on his Werther , which, like most of his contemporaries, he saw as the author's main work. Similar to Fauststoff , Schiller's Die Räuber or Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz , the “German” Werther became an icon of an international popular culture, the center of which was Paris at the time.
Serious and parodic Wertheriaden in opera and ballet abound: Rodolphe Kreutzer composed an Opéra comique Charlotte et Werther as early as 1792 . In 1817 at the Paris Théâtre des Variétés a vaudeville with the title Werther ou Les égarements d'un cœur sensible by Georges Duval came out, which was given for years. Johann Simon Mayr composed an opera Verter between 1794 and 1797 (also attributed to Vincenzo Pucitta ). Jules Massenet's Werther (1892) became the most famous Werther opera . The narcissistic hero was a popular stage character in the drame lyrique of the time .
The Wilhelmine appropriation of Goethe as a national poet, neo-romantic currents, the decadence consciousness of the fin de siècle, fascinated by illness and death, and other factors, such as the psychopathographic and socially critical implications of the text, may have been some of the reasons for this again in this period a noticeable number of repetitions and variations of the Werther novel and the Werther figure in the German-speaking area.
In Ludwig Jacobowski's Werther, der Jude (1892), the Werther figure fails because of the conflict between their own desire for assimilation , the indestructible roots in their Jewish origins and the anti-Semitism that is once again blossoming in the German nation -state .
In 1902 the pseudonymous author Narkissos created a homosexual Werther ( Der neue Werther ). Reinhard Goering with Jung Schuk and Hans Carossa with Doctor Bürgers Ende , both in 1913, developed over-reflective, highly sensitive artistic natures that perish because of the contradiction between the self and social reality.
These and other works almost all imitated the monoperspective form of their model in the form of the diary novel. Traces of the Werther figure can also be found in Thomas Mann's early work (deficient personality, suffering from one's own inability to live, inability to produce art, etc.) and in Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufschriften des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), where some motifs and the diary form can be found Referring to the suffering of young Werther . Mention should also be made of Hesse's Der Steppenwolf (1927) as well as parts of Joseph Goebbels ' Michael (1929) and Views of a Clown by Heinrich Böll (1963).
A politically accented Werther , of the spirit of the '68 movement in what was then East Germany put it, was Ulrich Plenzdorf New Sorrows of Young W. .
In 1975 Karl Heinz Kramberg referred to "Werther's suffering" by choosing the title of the novel Werters Freuden .
Ines Eck described Werther from Lotte's point of view. Her text Werther says Lotte was premiered in 2010 at the Freiburg Theater, directed by Matthias Brenner , and broadcast as a radio play on the Hessian and Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk.
The pop-literary and emphatically introspective autobiography The Rise and Fall of Maximilian Hecker (2012) is also to be understood as a modern heriad of values .
list
| author | plant | year |
|---|---|---|
| August Cornelius Stockmann | The Sorrows of Young Wertherinn , Griesbachische Buchhandlung, Eisenach. | 1775 |
| Christoph Friedrich Nicolai | Joys of young Werther . | 1775 |
| August Friedrich von Goué | Masuria or the young Werther. A tragedy from Illyrian. | 1775 |
| Carl Ernst von Reitzenstein | Lotte at Werther's grave. | 1775 |
| Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz | Letters about the morality of young Werther's sufferings. | |
| Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen | The Werther fever, an unfinished family piece | 1776 |
| Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz | The forest brother, a counterpart to Werther's suffering . In: Sigrid Damm (Ed.): Works and letters in three volumes. Vol. 2, Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1987, pp. 380-412. | 1776 |
| Johann Martin Miller | Siegwart, a monastery story. | 1776 |
| Herbert Croft | Love and Madness, a story too true, in a series of letters between parties whose names could perhaps be mentioned were they less known or less lamented. | 1780 |
| Heinrich von Kleist | The new (happier) Werther. | 1811 |
| Achim von Arnim | The broken stagecoach. Text for a comic operetta | 1818 |
| Johann Nestroy | Werther's suffering and his lost Lotte. | 1847 |
| Jules Massenet | Werther . (Opera) | 1892 |
| André Calmettes | Werther. (Filming) | 1910 |
| Arnold Mendelssohn | Three madrigals in the words of young Werther . ( Madrigals for mixed choir) | 1912 |
| Hans Carossa | Doctor Bürger's end. Last leaves of a diary. Insel, Leipzig. | 1913 |
| Reinhard Goering | Young Schuk. In: Ders .: prose, dramas, verses. Langen & Müller, Munich 1961, pp. 95-266. | 1913 |
| Joseph Goebbels | Michael - a German fate. In: diary sheets. | 1929 |
| Max Ophüls | Werther. (Filming) | 1938 |
| Thomas Mann | Lotte in Weimar . | 1939 |
| Karl Heinz Stroux | Encounter with Werther . ( Film adaptation, see German Film Institute ) | 1949 |
| Jerome D. Salinger | The catcher in the rye . | 1951 |
| Ulrich Plenzdorf | The new sufferings of young W. | 1972 |
| Egon Günther | The Sorrows of Young Werther. (Film adaptation, [1] ) | 1977 |
| Dana Bönisch | Rock days . | 2003 |
| Maximilian Hecker | The Rise and Fall of Maximilian Hecker . | 2012 |
| Jacques Doillon | The Sorrows of Young Werther | 2017 |
literature
- Stuart Pratt Atkins: The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1949.
- Ingrid Engel: Werther and the Wertheriads. A contribution to the history of the impact. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1986.
- Thomas Horré: Werther novel and Werther figure in the German prose of the Wilhelmine era. Variations on a Theme by JW Goethe. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1997.
- Georg Jäger: The sufferings of the old and new Werther. Comments, images, materials on Goethe's 'Sorrows of Young Werther' and Plenzdorf's 'New Sorrows of Young W.' With a contribution to the Werther illustrations v. Jutta Assel. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1984.
- Lorna Martens: The Diary Novel. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge et al. a. 1985.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jacques Doillon: The sufferings of the young Werther. KNM Home Entertainment, March 15, 2017, accessed February 13, 2020 .