Ulrich Plenzdorf, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W [The New Sufferings of Young W.]

Gerhart Hoffmeister (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Ed. by Gerhard P. Knapp, University of Utah
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.1: German-language Writing and Culture: Germany, 500-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1973

Places

Germany (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Almost 200 years after Goethe’s

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

[

The Sufferings of Young Werther

, 1774], Ulrich Plenzdorf revived and reinterpreted the tragic love story of the Storm and Stress era by transplanting it to Berlin under Communist rule in the German Democratic Republic with the title

Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.

[

The New Sufferings of Young W.

]. With a strong admixture from J. D. Salinger’s

The Catcher in the Rye

(1951), the story of a runaway teenager who is disgusted with the phoniness of the adult world, Plenzdorf presents the tale of Edgar, the “Red Werther in Blue Jeans” (Rolf Michaelis). Initially composed as a film-script in 1968, it appeared for the first time in instalments in the periodical

Sinn und Form

(1972) during a political “thaw” after the…

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1231 words

Citation: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "Die neuen Leiden des jungen W". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 March 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23533, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Ulrich Plenzdorf, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W [The New Sufferings of Young W.]

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