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Novelle

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Published in 1828, Novelle was so named by Goethe because he intended the work to be a “model specimen” of the literary novella. Like the tales of Boccaccio that served as his literary inspiration for the genre, Goethe's novellas were defined by what the writer called a narration of a single striking or unique event—in this case, a nobleman saving a princess from an escaped tiger. As Goethe continued to write novellas he introduced a moral component to his narratives, and so expanded the concept of the genre, and by the mid-nineteenth century the distinguishing feature of the German novella was the resolution of moral conflicts. With its unusual setting, remarkable incident, and moral themes, Novelle serves as a perfect statement of the form as Goethe conceived it. Goethe likened the structure of Novelle to the growth of a plant, and he decided that its final ideal resolution of inner and outer conflict should appear to readers as surprising, but as organic as the bloom of a flower.

In 1797, Goethe begun writing the tale in rhyming verse under the title Jagdgedicht (The Hunt), but abandoned the project when Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt were less than enthusiastic about the piece. Thirty years later Goethe returned to the story and wrote it in prose form. Goethe remarked to his friend Johann Eckermann, that “it was the aim of this novella to show how that which is unruly and untamable can often be better overcome by love and piety than by force.”

Plot and Major Characters
The action of Novelle takes place in a single day in an unidentified German kingdom. The Prince is preparing to lead a group of noblemen out to the woods for a hunting expedition, but the hunt is delayed as he says farewell to his new bride, the Princess. When he finally rides away on his horse, the Princess sadly watches his departure with the aid of a telescope. The Prince has one of his noblemen, Honorio, remain behind to act as his wife's personal attendant. The Prince's uncle, Friedrich, tries to cheer the Princess after her husband has left by showing her drawings of the old family castle which has long since been abandoned and lies in ruins. She asks to take a horse ride to view the old castle in person, but Friedrich refuses because the path is so overgrown and he worries for her safety. Finally, Friedrich and Honorio agree to accompany the princess to the base of the castle to view the surrounding countryside.

As they make their way through the town square, their horses become frightened by the roars of a lion. They see a collection of wild animals owned and caged by a family that makes its living by exhibiting the animals to the townspeople. Friedrich refuses to stop and view the animals, and so the group leaves town to ride through the countryside to the castle ruins.

Honorio and the Princess pass the time looking out on their surroundings with the aid of the telescope. He observes in horror that the village they have left behind is being consumed by a fire. The Princess directs Friedrich to return at once to the town to help the townsfolk; she and Honorio will make their way back at a more leisurely pace so as not to endanger her safety. After Friedrich's departure, Honorio and the Princess are threatened by an approaching tiger. He orders her to escape on her horse, but the tiger follows her. As he chases the tiger trying to shoot it, his first shot misses its mark; when the princess's horse stumbles, it appears that the tiger will overtake her. Before it does, however, Honorio's second shot fatally wounds the tiger.

As he sits atop the tiger's corpse, Honorio begs the Princess that she grant him a special wish: to be allowed to leave the kingdom, something that the Prince has never allowed him. She assures him that she is sure that in light of all that has happened her husband will consent to this request. However, Honorio seems saddened by her reply, implying that he was secretly in love with the Princess.

The scene is interrupted by the arrival of the owners of the dead tiger. They are distressed to find the tiger dead, crying out that the animal was tame and would not have hurt them. They inquire if the couple has seen their lion, which also had escaped when the fire had started to burn in the town. The Prince and his hunting expedition—returning early because they too have noticed the fire—come across the unhappy group. When the Prince learns what has happened, he orders his men to find the lion and kill it. The owner of the animals tells the Prince that he and his son can capture the lion, which they claim is also tame, without weapons. As the conversation continues, the boy plays his flute and sings a biblically inspired song about Daniel and the lions.

The lion is spotted sitting high in the ruins of the old castle. The boy approaches the lion, and with his flute and singing is able to lead the lion away from the hunters. He finds that the lion is hurt, removes a thorn from its paw, and continues to sing as the lion nestles in his arms. The danger is past, and the story concludes.

Major Themes
Most critics agree that the central theme of Novelle is that personal and social harmony are the results of moral self-mastery. Related to this is the idea that force is not the best means for creating societal stability. While the narrator only hints at Honorio's love for the Princess, his offer of the tiger's pelt while on bended knee is seen to be his declaration of love for an unobtainable lady in the German tradition of Minnesänger (troubadours). The Princess, too, can be seen as being drawn to the handsome Honorio because of her concern that the dying tiger has the potential to hurt him. Their mutual attraction, if acted upon, would cause problems not only for the royal couple, but for the entire kingdom that considers them as role models. The tiger and lion, like love itself, are at once tame creatures and symbols of latent aggression and disharmony. Many critics have noted that in the end it is not the lion, but Honorio himself, who is tamed as he watches the example of the flute-playing boy. Critics have noted that the tiger and lion—since they are tame and pose no real threat to Honorio or the Princess—represent the irrational fears of mankind. Honorio's violence can be viewed in contrast to the non-violence of the boy's actions.

A few critics have suggested that Goethe used the symbolism of Novelle as a guise for his political beliefs. Friedrich, it is claimed, refers to the German historical figure Friedrich the Great, and the name Honorio is symbolic of the honorary German nobility of the time. The fire has been interpreted as a veiled reference to the French Revolution. The religious family who cares for the wild animals symbolizes Goethe's belief that nationalism and revolution in Germany could only bring positive results if they were tempered by the language and reverence of the Christian religion. Others commentators have argued that the story is meant to show that literature itself could act as a stabilizing force in Germany, and that art could have the same type of positive influence as Goethe believed religion could have.

Critical Reception
While the fairy-tale qualities of Novelle make the story accessible to all readers, the work continues to elicit a great deal of scholarship, primarily in German, in an attempt to unravel the multiple layers of symbolism in the narrative. Many critics have praised Goethe's method of building psychological tension in the novella as he moves back and forth between idyllic descriptions of the natural surroundings and scenes of violence and despair. Others have noted the use of various optical motifs. There remains considerable disagreement as to how to view each of the characters of the novella. Most critics, for example, have argued that Honorio learns self-mastery from the events outside the old castle; others claim that the non-violence of the child exposes Honorio as a man who has made bad decisions because of irrational fear and infatuation with the Princess.

From its initial publication, critics have praised Novelle for its subtle literary techniques and for the depth of its symbolism. Unlike Goethe's early novellas in which external events are the center of attention, Novelle forces the reader to concentrate on how external events affect the inner lives of its characters. This shift from a concentration on external events to their inner significance has been called Goethe's major contribution to the German short story genre.

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1828

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About the author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

13.4k books7,040 followers
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust , published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scientific research in various fields, notably botany, and held several governmental positions.

George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Works span the fields of literature, theology, and humanism.
People laud this magnum opus as one of the peaks of world literature. Other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther .

With this key figure of German literature, the movement of Weimar classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries coincided with Enlightenment, sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours , he influenced Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. He also long served as the privy councilor ("Geheimrat") of the duchy of Weimar.

Goethe took great interest in the literatures of England, France, Italy, classical Greece, Persia, and Arabia and originated the concept of Weltliteratur ("world literature"). Despite his major, virtually immeasurable influence on German philosophy especially on the generation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, he expressly and decidedly refrained from practicing philosophy in the rarefied sense.

Influence spread across Europe, and for the next century, his works inspired much music, drama, poetry and philosophy. Many persons consider Goethe the most important writer in the German language and one of the most important thinkers in western culture as well. Early in his career, however, he wondered about painting, perhaps his true vocation; late in his life, he expressed the expectation that people ultimately would remember his work in optics.

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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for Matt.
752 reviews628 followers
December 29, 2018

Goethe’s “Novella” – A Word Analysis

Apart from his large body of poems, dramas, epics, novels, autobiographic writings, translations, writings on art, literature and science, as well as letters and diaries, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is also known for his large vocabulary. There’s a project called “Goethe Dictionary” which aims at providing a complete list of the words (and their meaning) in Goethe’s text corpus. I couldn’t find out if this project is on-going. I assume it’s not, because the latest result I found was published in 2012, and the dictionary is still rather incomplete. It only contains entries from A to the word Medizinalaufwand (see here). Nevertheless, the total number of entries is estimated at around 90,000 words (as individual dictionary entries). Goethe’s vocabulary is exceptionally large in comparison with the previously assessed vocabularies of other authors:
29,000 for William Shakespeare,
27,000 for Henrik Ibsen,
23,000 for Martin Luther’s German writings,
22,400 for Theodor Storm (without his letters),
21,200 for Alexander Puschkin,
12,500 for John Milton,
12,400 for Miguel de Cervantes.

From time to time I determine the number of different words in a text, especially when I get the impression that a large vocabulary has been used. I have written my own little computer program to do this job (of course, I need the text in electronic form). The number of different words can be put in relation to the total number of words and thus gives us a measure of the author’s word finding ability.

Especially in German, a difficulty arises due to the flexion of nouns, verbs and adjectives as well as plural forms. You usually get a higher number of words than are actually present. Ideally, only the basic forms (that is the “stems”) should be counted. A so-called Stemmer helps; an algorithm that does just that: convert any word to its basic form before further processing. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no such algorithm for German that works 100% correctly. In my program I use a rather simple approach, which is described here.

Another issue to consider are the so-called stop words (SW). Those are words that are filtered out for a given purpose before processing a text. I maintain a list of about 230 most frequently used words in German texts (like the articles der/die/das, und, ich … etc.) and I let my program run with and without those words to see if there’s a significant difference.

Finally I have to deal with words (usually nouns) that end with a hyphen indicating that the actual ending of the word is found in another word shortly after it.
My program is not yet capable to handle those words automatically so I decided to manually change the hyphenated words and replaced the hyphens with the correct endings (for instance “Stall- und Hofjunker” becomes “Stalljunker und Hofjunker”, “vor- als hinterwärts” becomes “vorwärts als hinterwärts”, and so on; there are a total of 12 occurrences in the text)

Results

The original text of Goethe's “Novella” contains 7,092 words. Without using Stemmer or SW there are 2,589 different words, or 37%. In other words: On average every third word is a new one! For comparison: In Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg “only” about every eighth word was new (but this is also a much longer text). Of the 2,589 different words, 1,803 (or 70%) occurred exactly once. This is also a very high number! After the Stemmer there are still 1,961 different words (28%) left, so about every fourth word is new and the number of words that occur only once drops to 1.226 (63%). If the SW are ignored, the text (after Stemmer) has only 3,578 words left, of which 1,845 (52%) are different. Without the stop words every second word is new and the number of single-word-usages increases again to 66%.
                                   No SW
        Orig.Text Stemmed  No SW Stemmed
========================================
Total       7,029   7,029  3,578   3,578
Different   2,589   1,961  2,408   1,845
%Diff.        37%     28%    67%     52%
Single Use  1,803   1,226  1,776   1,223
%Single Use   70%     63%    74%     66%
So even in this relatively short text one can already recognize and see confirmed that Goethe was a true word magician.

By the way, the longest word used here in this text is Vergrößerungsfähigkeit which has 22 letters (the English translation for this is magnification capability with 23 letters).



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Profile Image for Semjon.
772 reviews507 followers
January 2, 2019
Die Handlung ist nach heutigen Gesichtspunkten kitschig, aber sprachlich ist die Novelle von Goethe natürlich ein Hochgenuß, vor allem am Ende, wenn es dann auch noch poetisch wird.

Irgendwie wirkt es ja schon fast anmaßend, wenn unser Universalgenie als Titel für sein Werk ausgerechnet die Erzählform nimmt. Das vermittelt den Eindruck, als wenn er mit seiner Raubtiergeschichte das Referenzwerk für alle nachkommenden Novellen dieser Welt legen wollte. Zu einer Novelle gehört ein unvorhergesehnes Ereignis. Hier sind es entlaufene Wildtiere im friedlichen deutschen Städtchen. Der Erwachsene tötet, während das Kind mit der Flöte pazifistisch erfolgreich ist. Schöne, romantische Moral. Mir hat es gefallen.
Profile Image for Reece.
137 reviews11 followers
June 15, 2025
Goethe’s Novella is the textbook definition of “short and sweet.” Like all of his other literature, this work has a proverbial tinge to it, containing that distinct feeling of timelessness so homely in his fiction writings. It is an expression on love and faith, and especially in identifying the loving, peaceable nature of creatures, regardless of whether they stand betwixt two mortal dangers or entirely at peace in a meadow of ancient, towering oaks. Goethe, so obsessed with notions of innocence, shows his hand at the oft-forgotten fragility of life, certainly so once terror provokes, but also the joy and warmth that comes to one who preserves life and thereby, their innocence as well. It is infectious, and the great care shown by one soon spreads to others. Though hints of Hell rear around every corner, so too does Heaven.
Profile Image for Nabeel Naqvi.
14 reviews3 followers
July 26, 2021
"From deep down and from the darkness
Rises now the prophet's song;
God and Angels hover round him-
Why should he fear the wrong?
Lion and lioness together
Rub against his knees and purr,
For that melting holy music
Stills their savage stir,

For the eternal rules the waters,
Rules the earth, the air, the fire;
Like a lamb the lion shall gambol
And the flood retire.
Lo! The naked sword of anger
Hangs arrested in midair:
Strong the Love and great its wonders
That abides in prayer.

So good children find the Angels
Near them in their hour of need,
To prevent designing evil
And promote the shining deed.
So the dear child walks in safety
For the notes, bewitching sweet,
Bring the tyrant of the forest
Gentle to his gentle feet."
Profile Image for Dmitry Bezverkhiy.
110 reviews2 followers
April 28, 2024
Now I understand what is Romanticism is about. And this novel is a good example of it.

It is all about trying to understand the world around us not only through rationality but through emotion and Nature around us.
Recently I learned about Madame de Staël, who contributed to it's spread across Europe.
She was studying German literature to find out what Romanticism is about and even wrote a book about Germany and it's philosophy and literature.

Nice short read for improving my German.

Profile Image for Jordan.
127 reviews3 followers
April 19, 2019
This was pretty boring, though I liked how the dangerous situation is handled. Some conflicts do not have be solved with guns and war, as shown by this story. The metaphor that this book uses is pretty obvious and important, but the rest is so incredibly boring that I can only fine this a 2/5 rating.
Profile Image for Sarah .
439 reviews28 followers
November 9, 2019
Ein Spazierritt bekommt eine "aufregende" Wendung, als durch ein Feuer Löwe & Tiger frei durch den Wald laufen.
Und der Rest? Langweilig. Ich konnte der Geschichte nichts abgewinnen. Letztlich wird die Story mit einer zweigeteilten, konträren Lösung beendet, das war wohl auch der interessanteste Aspekt.
Profile Image for Conrad.
43 reviews1 follower
January 3, 2023
Lovely short story, it shows the possibility of friendship between mankind and wild animals.


Protecting the wildlife is a common sense nowadays, but it wasn't always. This shows Goethe was ahead of his time.
Profile Image for Michael A..
428 reviews93 followers
June 9, 2018
well written, pretty short, a nice ending with a plot that borders on the mundane and fantastic.
Profile Image for Ethan.
118 reviews1 follower
December 25, 2024
Pretty Language but feels unfinished. Half the characters are forgotten or just not characterized.
16 reviews5 followers
August 22, 2015
Nothing to go crazy over. It was beautifully written, but I wasn't too interested with the issues raised despite my romantic inclinations. The one character I was interested in does not get his resolution.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

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