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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2023
When We Explore Literary Texts that manage to be both masterpieces and bestsellers, we should endeavor to abstain from critical fastidiousness in respect of their literary popularity. I have spent much of my professional life in seeking to bring German literature close to an Anglo-Saxon readership. One of the problems that inevitably besets that enterprise is the fact that, in contrast to (say) English literature, German literature of the last two hundred years or so does not abound in masterpieces that have overwhelming page-turning appeal. Much of my own research has concerned German prose fiction from the late eighteenth century to the present, and I would have been not just pleased but elated if the texts in question had had the popular appeal of Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, or George Eliot. One of the key inmates of my German pantheon—none other than Goethe, himself the author of the first great bestseller to come out of the German-speaking lands, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774)—was troubled by the lack of easy commerce in Germany between high culture and popular literacy, between reflectivity and spontaneity:
Die Deutschen sind übrigens wunderliche Leute!—Sie machen sich durch ihre tiefen Gedanken und Ideen, die sie überall suchen und überall hineinlegen, das Leben schwerer als billig.—Ei! So habt doch einmal die Courage, euch den Eindrücken hinzugeben, euch ergötzen zu lassen, euch rühren zu lassen, ja euch belehren und zu etwas Großem entflammen und ermutigen zu lassen; aber denkt nur nicht immer, es wäre alles eitel, wenn es nicht irgend abstrakter Gedanke und Idee wäre.1
[The Germans are, incidentally, strange people!—They make life more difficult than necessary for themselves by their thoughts and ideas that they look for everywhere and that they everywhere read into things.—Ow! Have for once the courage to surrender to impressions, to take delight in being moved, to be uplifted, to be instructed and to be enthused in a great cause; but do not always think that everything is in vain unless it is some abstract thought or idea.]
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