In Elective Affinities Goethe conducts an experiment with the lives
of people who are living badly. Charlotte and Eduard, aristocracts
with little to occupy them, invite Ottilie and the Captain into
their lives; against morality, good sense, and conscious volition
all four are drawn into relationships as inexorably as if they were
substances in a chemical equation.
The novel asks whether we have free will or not; more disturbingly,
it confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of
their repression of any real life in themselves.
Goethe wrote Elective Affinities when he was sixty and long
established as Germany's literary giant. He remained an uneasy
and scandalous figure, none the less, and readers of Elective
Affinities were profoundly disturbed by its penetrating study of
marriage and passion.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe geboren am 28.8.1749 in Frankfurt a.M., gestorben am 22.3.1832 in Weimar. Jurastudium in Leipzig und Strassburg. Lebenslanges Wirken in Weimar. Reisen zum Rhein, nach der Schweiz, Italien und Böhmen. Frühe Erfolge mit den Sturm und Drang-Stücken 'Götz' und 'Werther', Gedichte (herrliche Liebeslyrik), Epen, Dramen ('Faust', 'Tasso', 'Iphigenie' u. v. a.), Autobiographien. Zeichner und Universalgelehrter: Botanik, Morphologie, Mineralogie, Optik. Theaterleiter und Staatsmann. Freundschaft und Korrespondenz mit den grössten Dichtern, Denkern und Forschern seiner Zeit (Schiller, Humboldt, Schelling . . .). Goethe prägte den Begriff Weltliteratur, und er ist der erste und bis zum heutigen Tag herausragendste Deutsche, der zu ihren Vertretern gehört.
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