Lotte In Weimar: The Beloved Returns
Lotte In Weimar: The Beloved Returns
By Thomas Mann
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
Introduction by Hayden White
"There emerges from the pages of this volume such a hopeful view of man as the master of his own fate that the reader cannot fail to be lifted above himself."—A. E. Meyer, New York Times
Thomas Mann, fascinated with the concept of genius and with the richness of German culture, found in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the embodiment of the German culture hero. Mann's novelistic biography of Goethe was first published in English in 1940. Lotte in Weimar is a vivid dual portrait—a complex study of Goethe and of Lotte, the still-vivacious woman who in her youth was the model for Charlotte in Goethe's widely-read The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lotte's thoughts, as she anticipates meeting Goethe again after forty years, and her conversations with those in Weimar who knew the great man, allow Mann to assess Goethe's genius from many points of view. Hayden White's fresh appraisal of the novel reveals its consonances with our own concerns.
Paperback
475 pages
University of California Press, 1990
Originally Published in 1939
5.6 x 1.2 x 8.4 inches
ISBN 9780520070073
Biographical Historical Fiction