Goethe-Kino: Lotte in Weimar by Egon Günther

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann’s birth, we are presenting two adaptations of his novels. A newly restored digital version of Gerhard Lamprecht’s silent-era Buddenbrooks (1923) will be screened in our cinema, while Egon Günther’s Lotte in Weimar (1975) will be available on Goethe on Demand through June 2025.

Commissioned to mark Thomas Mann’s centenary in 1975, Egon Günther’s often comic and lavishly staged adaptation of Mann’s 1939 novel became the first DEFA production to compete at the Cannes Film Festival. 

On a late summer day in 1816, Charlotte Kestner (née Buff), the widow of a privy councillor, arrives in Weimar accompanied by her daughter and a maidservant. Ostensibly visiting her younger sister, Charlotte—now in her early sixties—may also be drawn by the prospect of once again seeing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, with whom she had a youthful romance and who later immortalized her as Lotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther. The trio takes lodgings at the inn Zum Elephanten, where it doesn’t take long for Mager, the inn’s well-read head waiter, to recognize Charlotte. He quickly spreads the news of her presence. Soon, a curious crowd gathers, and Mager begins ushering a stream of notable visitors to Charlotte’s room: Dr. Riemer, both an admirer and critic of Goethe; Adele Schopenhauer, whose friend is courted by Goethe’s son August; August himself; and several others. Eventually, Charlotte also meets Goethe—but it is not the kind of meeting she had hoped for.

Egon Günther’s 1975 film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel—written during Mann’s exile and first published in Sweden in 1939—was produced by DEFA, East Germany’s state-run film studio. Commissioned to mark both the centenary of Thomas Mann’s birth and the 1000th anniversary of the city of Weimar, the film was a prestigious production, generously funded and widely publicised. It premiered in East Germany on June 6, Mann’s birthday, at the Cinema International in Berlin, following its international debut at the Cannes Film Festival—where it became the first DEFA film to compete for the Palme d’Or.

The lead role of Charlotte was played by Lilli Palmer, an actress from the West with a distinguished career in the UK, the US, and West Germany. Palmer had personally approached Günther for the role, and the director had to emphasise her British citizenship to secure official approval for her casting. The rest of the cast featured prominent East German actors, including Martin Hellberg—also a renowned theatre and film director and manager of the Dresden State Theater—as the older Goethe, and Jutta Hoffmann, familiar to West German audiences from Heiner Carow’s 1976 hit The Legend of Paul and Paula, as Adele Schopenhauer. The film was released in West Germany in November 1975.

Lotte in Weimar was one of several so-called "Erbefilme" (“heritage films”) produced by DEFA in the 1970s. These included Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften, GDR 1974) by Siegfried Kühn, Günther’s own The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, GDR 1976), both Goethe adaptations; and biopics such as Beethoven – Days from a Life (Beethoven – Tage aus einem Leben, GDR 1978) by Horst Seemann, and Addio piccola mia (GDR 1979) by Lothar Warneke, about Georg Büchner. While these films aligned with official cultural policy that sought to root GDR identity in pre-socialist German art and literature, they also offered filmmakers a subtle means of critiquing the East German state—whose tolerance for dissenting voices fluctuated with the political climate, ranging from imposed re-edits to outright bans.

Günther, who had often faced such constraints, developed a strategy of alternating between historical adaptations and contemporary narratives. When he made Lotte in Weimar, East German cultural policy was encouraging a more critical engagement with Germany’s classical heritage, and the film thus presents a less-than-flattering portrait of the aging Goethe – a marked difference from the literary text. For Thomas Mann, the novel had provided an opportunity to deeply engage with Goethe, whom he admired and through whom he also reflected on his own identity as an artist and his relationship to Germany. Though the novel focuses on Charlotte, Mann dedicated an entire chapter—“The Chapter Seven”—to exploring Goethe’s inner world. Günther omits this internal perspective (except for a moment). Instead, he uses an extended banquet scene to depict Goethe lecturing a circle of guests who slavishly hang on his every word, eventually bursting into a grotesque fit of laughter.

As film historian Daniela Berghahn has pointed out, Günther was more interested in the cult surrounding Goethe than in the man himself. She argues that by highlighting Goethe’s flaws, the film “obliquely comments upon the hypocritical relationship between the proclaimed objectives of raising a socialist consciousness and its actual outcomes: while pretending to promote the development of the well-educated and all-rounded individual, it actually breeds a nation of slaves, of impaired individuals, who only parrot their supreme educator’s words and never dare to voice their own opinion.”  (Daniela Berghahn, “The Re-evaluation of Goethe and The Classical Tradition in the Films of Egon Günther and Siegfried Kühn,” 1999)
 

GDR, 1975. Colour. 119 minutes. With English subtitles.
Directed by Egon Günther. With Lilli Palmer, Martin Hellberg, Rolf Ludwig, Hilmar Baumann, Jutta Hoffmann, Katharina Thalbach, Monika Lennartz, Norbert Christian, Hans-Joachim Hegewald, Walter Lendrich


Please not that this online screening is only available in the UK.