Lotte In Weimar: Thomas Mann

Read Thomas Mann`s meditation on the power of literary representation and the tyranny of the writer`s imagination.

Mann`s novel, written some 150 years after Goethe`s The Sorrows of Young Werther, follows Lotte Kestner, Goethe`s real-life heroine, as she makes a pilgrimage to Weimar to meet the author who courted her forty years before. To her surprise, Lotte is greeted on her arrival as a celebrity and immediately taken up into Goethe`s set. Time and place are brilliantly evoked in Mann`s novel, but its genius lies in his masterful portrayal of Goethe himself, and of the astonishing influence he exerted on his contemporaries.