Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns - Nuremberg Trial

Nuremberg Trial

On 27 July 1946 Hartley Shawcross, Chief Prosecutor for the UK at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals at the end of his final argument told the International Military Tribunal:

"Years ago Goethe said of the German people that some day fate would strike them ...
... would strike them because they betrayed themselves and did not want to be what they are. It is sad that they do not know the charm of truth, that mist, smoke, and berserk immoderation are so dear to them, pathetic that they ingenuously submit to any mad scoundrel who appeals to their lowest instincts, who confirms them in their vices and teaches them to conceive nationalism as isolation and brutality."
With what a voice of prophecy he spoke-for these are the mad scoundrels who did those very things."

Later Shawcross expressed his hope that by the judgement of the court could in the future

"those other words of Goethe be translated into fact, not only, as we must hope, of the German people but of the whole community of man:
... thus ought the German people to behave: giving and receiving from the world, their hearts open to every fruitful source of wonder, great through understanding and love, through mediation and the spirit-thus ought they to be; that is their destiny."

Within a few days, the British press was commenting that these were not Goethe's words at all but words put into his mouth by Thomas Mann in the seventh chapter of his novel Lotte in Weimar. On 16 August 1946 Mann, living in Pacific Palisades, California, received a letter from the British ambassador in Washington inquiring “whether you put the words into Goethe’s mouth or whether they are an actual quotation from the latter’s works. If they do represent an actual quotation, I should be very glad if you could let me know in which work they appear. It is, of course, possible that they are a passage from a contemporary or later commentator. Should this be the case, perhaps you would be good enough to say where you got them from.”

Mann answered the ambassador: "It is true, the quoted words do not appear literally in Goethe's writings or conversations; but they were conceived and formulated strictly in his spirit and although he never spoke them, he might well have done so." For Goethe’s monologue in the novel many quotations had been "modified and variegated for poetic purposes.” On the other hand the monologue contained much which Goethe had never said but was so much in line with what one knew of his thinking that it could be called authentic. Therefore in a higher sense the words the British prosecutor had used were indeed Goethe’s.

In his “The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus” Thomas Mann later explained that already during the war a few copies of “Lotte in Weimar” had been smuggled into Germany from Switzerland and that haters of the regime had distributed a compilation of excerpts from the monologue in the seventh chapter under the camouflage title “From Goethe’s Conversations With Riemer”. A copy or a translation had come into the hands of Sir Hartley Shawcross who - finding its content striking - in good faith had used it extensively in his final argument.

Read more about this topic:  Lotte In Weimar: The Beloved Returns

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    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)