Goethe!

He was one of Germany's greatest poets. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's legacy, while not only one of the greatest cultural legacies Germany can claim, has been annoying nearly every student for generations with forced readings of "Faust", "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and other works. A film about Goethe is therefore unlikely to meet with much interest, especially among young moviegoers. But Philipp Stölzl ("Nordwand") now tells in "Goethe!" an important chapter from the life of the poet and thinker in a somewhat different way, which literati, Germanists and historians may hardly taste, but which offers very good cinema entertainment of the lighter variety.

When the young Johann Goethe (Alexander Fehling) increasingly neglects his law studies and prefers to spend his time writing dramas that no publisher wants to publish, he is unceremoniously sent by his father (Henry Hübchen) as a trainee lawyer to the Imperial Chamber Court in sleepy Wetzlar. Under the strict supervision of Albert Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu), Johann must now process mountains of court files - a task he performs in exemplary fashion despite the harassment of his superior. But when the young Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein) enters his life and almost immediately captures his heart, Goethe's life is once again thrown into disarray. For as beautiful as the blazing passion between the two of them feels, it is not under a good star. Lotte is promised to another man. And the other man is, of all people, Kestner.

"Goethe!", a kind of German variant of "Shakespeare in Love", tells a wonderful love story and, quite incidentally, the genesis of Goethe's most personal drama, "The Sorrows of Young Werther", a book that triggered an unprecedented suicide wave. Actors, sets, music and camerawork - all these aspects of the production deserve high praise. Stölzl, in his best moments, has delivered international-looking staging that is carried by well-chosen actors.

Although true aficionados of Goethe's work will probably be bothered by the fact that Stölzl has chosen a rather uninhibited, casual way of telling the story of the love between Goethe and Lotte, nothing better could have happened to the film. For instead of a pretty to look at, but cramped and somehow dusty drama, like the recent adaptation of "Buddenbrooks", "Goethe!" has become a sometimes pleasurable, sometimes moving love drama that, although it tells a story that is over 230 years old, seems surprisingly young and fresh.

Thus, "Goethe!" can be accused of being rather disappointing as a credible biography of the poet. But as a German entertainment cinema, which perhaps sparks the curiosity in one or the other younger viewer to deal with Goethe's work, and as a simply beautiful love story, the film works all the time. And exactly therefore applies: well worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp