Repulsiveness: Miss Schopenhauer

Abstract

The article proposes an approach to Thomas Mann’s "Lotte in Weimar" as a mythological construction that symbolises Germany’s behaviour faced with the emergence of Nazism. When Mann had to offer a diagnosis of the end of the Weimar Republic, he placed an old and lonely Goethe as the misunderstood genius dominating the small city, which was starting to be besieged by the forces of nationalism at the time. Mann makes use of the figure of Charlotte, Goethe’s former beloved who returned to the city forty years later. The heroine of Sturm und Drang, lacking neither practical sense or bourgeois spirit, Lotte was the incarnation of the past, the eternal Germany. Goethe, distanced from his youth and his former lover, represented the European spirit. Yet this article pays special attention to the figure of Ms Schopenhauer, whom Mann portrays with singular cruelty, as a figure representing the repulsive. Through these figures, Mann’s work presents an acute portrait of German nationalism and touches upon a genealogy of Nazism.