Wholly uneducated as he is and steeped in the slang idiom of the twentieth century, he is nevertheless fascinated by this 'old UTQ, Volume XLIV, Number 1, Fall 1974 2 HARRY STEINHAUER German' document and has memorized key passages from it. He had found a little Reclam paperback caIled The Sufferings of Young Werther minus the front and back pages, so that he does not know who wrote the book. Edgar Wibeau, a house painter by trade, is a latter-day Werther, an unrecognized genius: he wears long hair and blue jeans, which are to him not merely a style of dress but an attitude to life he is an enthusiastic admirer of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and of Louis Armstrong's jazz and he paints abstract pictures. As recently as 1972, Ulrich Plenzdorf, an East German writer, published a novella with the suggestive title The New Sufferings of Young W., which describes the fate of a young rebel against the Establishment, presumably that of the German Democratic Republic.Thomas Mann treated the Werther aftermath in his outstanding novel, Lotte in Weimar (1939) Andre Maurois devoted one of his three essays in Mtiipe (1926) to a retelling of the Werther story. A Werther film was produced in France in 1938. Of the three extant Werther operas, Massenet's (1892) is a major work of art. Lamartine, Sainte Beuve, Musset acknowledged the influence of Werther on their early careers. Among the notable works of literature that showed the influence of Goethe's novel were Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, Chateaubriand's Rene, Ugo Foscolo's ]acopo Ortis, Senancour's Obermann, Mickiewicz' Dziady, Flaubert's Education sentimentale. Poems, novels, dramas, musicals, operas, chapbooks were produced dealing with aspects of Werther.
Two new reprints were issued before the year was out a French translation appeared within a few months and many more followed there were translations into English, Russian, and many other European languages. But his book did enjoy a popularity till then unknown in the history of literature. Since there were at that time no book clubs, no television talk shows, no paperback or motion picture rights, no literary cocktail parties, its author (whose identity soon leaked out) was spared those trials and triumphs which his twentieth-century descendants must endure. In the jargon of our day it became an immediate best seller, perhaps the first in world literature. HARRY STEINHAUER Goethe's Werther after two centuries Goethe's novel The Sufferings of Young Werther appeared two centuries ago it was published anonymously at Leipzig in September 1774. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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