The enigma of Goethean personality, its appropriation and mimicking in the essays on Goethe and in the novel Lotte in Weimar, by Thomas Mann

Abstract

This article aims to unravel the main causes of intense interest and fascination that the personality of Goethe awoke in Thomas Mann; the thesis that underlies and inspires it is that, due to the very nature of this interest, its achievement could only reach its fullest expression in a novel like Lotte in Weimar, whose main themes and characteristics are already foreshadowed and prefigured (and later resumed) in many essays and lectures that Mann devoted to Goethe. By examining some of these issues and many formal elements of the novel, the article points out a path for the rehabilitation of the reach of reason and of philosophical discourse in understanding this “prodigy” – reach whose limits (professed by Mann) decides the genesis of the novel itself, which determines not only its extraordinary strength and fertility, but also the limitations that perhaps the interpretation of Mann accuses.