Thomas Mann’s self-reflexive meditation on the power of representation and the tyranny of the writer’s imagination, published in Vintage Classics for the first time
Forty years after their youthful association, Lotte Kestner, real life heroine of Goethe’s famous novel The Sorrows of Werther, make a pilgrimage to Weimer to see Goethe. To her surprise is greeted on her arrival as a celebrity and taken up into Goethe’s set. Evocations of time and place are brilliantly created in this novel, but its genius lies in Mann’s masterful portrayal of Goethe and the extraordinary influence exerted on his contemporaries.
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