Lotte in Weimar, or The Beloved Returns
Thomas Mann
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1964; trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter)

463 pp.  First reading.
Posted 11 December 2005.

Over the past five years I had read all - or so I thought - of the major works of Thomas Mann, and, besides having been a wonderfully enriching experience, this feat has warmed my heart with a fine sense of accomplishment.  Imagine my surprise, then, when while idly browsing the shelves at the local library my roving eye lit upon a hitherto unsuspected volume: Lotte in Weimar.  ‘Was in der Welt?’, I said to myself.  I brought it home like a child laden with candy.

The novel turns out to be an imaginative riff on an episode in German literary history.  In his youth, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fell in love with a young woman, Charlotte Buff, and out of that romance came the famous tragic tale of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  In his novel, Mann imagines Charlotte, fifty years later, returning to Weimar to meet the great poet again.  As always with Mann, there is more to the story than the scaffolding of the plot; the book is in many ways a meditation on creativity and the nature of literary genius, and of Goethe’s genius in particular.

Having said that, I am disappointed to report that I tried, but failed, to enjoy this book.  In part, I do think it is fair to say, the disappointment is with the book itself.  It would be foolhardy to expect a bouncing plot from Mann, but when the first 300 pages of the book consist only of long conversations in uncharacteristically colourless prose (including one monologue that stretches nearly to 100 pages) I couldn’t help wishing for something a little more engaging.  This was followed - and this seemed promising - by a sharp change of tone as we met Goethe himself for the first time.  For the next 100 pages, Mann eavesdrops on the mind of the great man as he works in his study.  But, forgive me, too much of


causes me to grow restless.  Has anyone ever used the stream-of-consciousness style successfully?  Things improved in the closing sections of the book, which recounted the long (long, long) looked for meeting of Goethe and Charlotte.  Here I felt I met again the Mann I know and love, but it was not enough to save the book in my mind.

I am not willing, however, to put the blame entirely on the novel itself; I, too, I expect, am to blame.  I know little of Goethe’s work, and so approached this story very much as an outsider.  I read it over too long a time and with insufficient attention.  I found myself frequently sighing with impatience.  I feel bad, because I know Mann deserves better.  And yet I do honestly believe that my failure to fully engage with the book is not solely my fault.  After all, why had I not heard of this book before?  Perhaps I am not the only one who struggled with it.

I doubt that I will be returning to this book in the future.  But this is no great cause for sorrow, for with The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, The Holy Sinner, and the enormous Joseph tetralogy, there is no shortage of great Thomas Mann novels to keep me occupied until the end of my days.

[A portrait of Goethe at table]
As he talked, his eyes, with the peculiar depression at their corners, embraced the whole table with their warm and brilliant glance; his lips moved freely, not invariably making a pleasant impression, for they seemed at times to be drawn down by some unlovely compulsion that was torturing and puzzling to behold, turning the pleasure at his words into uneasy pity.  But as a rule the pressure lifted speedily, and then the motions of the finely formed mouth were so full of satisfying charm that one felt how precise and unexaggerated a description was the Homeric epithet ‘ambrosial,’ even though one had never before applied it to a concrete instance.

[Goethe tells of a young man who kisses a portrait of Charity in an art gallery]
He spoke…of the deceptive effect of art, the most singular and precisely therefore the most fascinating of all phenomena, upon the reason.  Not alone in the sense of illusion, for it was by no mean a deliberate deception; but in a profounder way, through art’s relation with the earthly and the heavenly sphere at once, because its effect was both spiritual and sensuous, or, to speak in platonic language, it was divine and visible both, and through the senses worked on the spirit.  Hence the peculiar inwardness of the yearning aroused by the beautiful - expressed, in the present case, by the youthful art-lover’s act, through the medium of the laws of heat and cold.  The joke, of course, lay in the muddle-headed inadequacy of the poor youth’s act.  You could not help being sorry, even while you smiled, for the deluded young wretch’s feelings as his lips touched the cold smooth glass.  Could one conceive a more telling or touching allegory than this of hot-blooded emotion embodying itself by chance upon icily unresponsive matter?

---

Back to Book Note Index

Back to Books