Word: wertherisms
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...took stage center in the romantic era, when the glorious dreams of the French Revolution-and their bloody, reactionary demise -turned youth toward an eccentric sentimentality. "They found satisfaction in ideals," wrote Madame de Staël, "because reality offered them nothing to satisfy their imaginations." Goethe intended his Werther as a warning to this mooning generation, but the young character who committed suicide for unrequited love became the hero of romanticism. The dirty speech movement of that day was suicide. It was, as Princeton Historian James Billington points out, the first major appearance of alienated youth...
...expressive lyric poet who ever lived-a genius who differed in kind but not in degree from Dante and Shakespeare. He wrote a hundred times more than either of them-his collected works fill 150 volumes-and consequently more of what he wrote is dated; The Sorrows of Young Werther, for instance, reads in this unsentimental century like soap opera written in gold ink. But his finest works-Iphigenia, Tasso, Elective Affinities-embrace a massive range of experience, and in them all the print still lies warm on the page. Finally there is Faust, a masterpiece more than 60 years...
...years later, Goethe suffered another creative commotion, and in less than three weeks produced The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel that swept across Europe "like the Blue Plague"-a reference to the blue frock coat that Werther wore and that millions of young men now affected. To the disgust of their elders, they also went in for such Wertherisms as poetry, suicide and (horror of horrors in 18th century Germany) nude swimming...
...heaps of vegetables, meat, tiny eggs and fish. "China has not forgotten how to eat," one tourist was told by his guide. Nor has it forgotten how to cook-for those who can pay for it. The once-great cuisine of Peking has slipped, but French TV Commentator Maurice Werther, who traveled 10,000 miles during six weeks in China, would still give even tourist-hotel tables a two-star rating in Michel...
...Raves. Despite his position as resident brain-truster for the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe was still a deeply disordered man. He had recovered from a near nervous breakdown, apparently brought on by an early wallow in romantic agonizing in which he alternately "melted and raved" like his hero Werther. The routine of official duties had steadied him. He had studied science and accepted the soothing ministrations (thought to be platonic) of an older woman named Charlotte von Stein. But she had encouraged him to write only fanciful verse that had nothing to do with life or the natural world...