Word: wertherism
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There were academic fads in 1858 and 1958 alike. In Adams's day it was "German scholarship," and Goethe. 100 years later, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" were required reading but they had become incomprehensible, indeed ridiculous. But we had Freud--in Shakespeare, in history, in the family, everywhere but in bad, (particle hours is a phrase contemporary students may never have heard: it means "never...
There were academic fads in 1858 and 1958 alike. In Adams's day it was "German scholarship," and Goethe. 100 years later, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" were required reading but they had become incomprehensible, indeed ridiculous. But we had Freud--in Shakespeare, in history, in the family, everywhere but in bad, (particle hours is a phrase contemporary students may never have heard: it means "never...
...There is, for example, the Swiftian modest proposal for sending messages by artillery and cannon ball, if speed is what everybody wants. There is the marvelously straight-faced account of an ascension in the balloon of Professor J. There is the wonderful little parody of The Sorrows of Young Werther: instead of killing himself, boy gets girl and lives happily ever after, fathering 13 children. Goethe, it is sometimes said, wrote Werther in order not to become Werther. Moderns can honor him for his sanity without feeling especially close. Kleist became Werther, and we cannot honor him for that...
These incidents, in their ineffable silliness, are almost a match for the scene in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther when the hero and his beloved Lotte are silently savoring the beauty of a landscape after a storm. She utters one word, the name of a popular poet of the day: "Klopstock!" According to Goethe, Werther is "overcome by the flood of emotions which she evoked with this name...
...Werther's suicide for the love of Lotte inspired an epidemic of self-immolation in Germany in the 1770s, but history does not repeat itself in Lucio. True, he is in despair-life in Fascist Italy is intolerable and Beate refuses to sleep with him-but he is seeking ways to survive. Beate, on the other hand, wants to "carry despair to its logical conclusion, suicide." Their encounter, Lucio observes, had not been love, but death at first sight. Beate yearns for a suicide pact with Lucio that would be modeled on what she regards as an ideal death...