Novelle

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wurde 1749 in Frankfurt a. M. geboren. Er starb 1832 in Weimar. "Novelle" (1828) zählt zu Goethes großen Alterswerken. Er selbst "Zu zeigen, wie das Unbändige, Unüberwindliche oft besser durch Liebe und Frömmigkeit als durch Gewalt bezwungen werde, war die Aufgabe dieser Novelle." Sprachlich virtuos und von tief menschlichem Inhalt, zeigt sich der Weimarer Klassiker auf dem Höhepunkt seines Schaffens.

Genres: Classics, German Literature, Fiction, Novella, Germany

Audio CD

First published January 1, 1828

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

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).




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Semjon · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Reece · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Nabeel Naqvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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."

[Phoenix Rises · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece of German Romanticism, with all the wonder, heart, imagination, and courage you would expect from Goethe.

[Dmitry Bezverkhiy · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Conrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Michael A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

well written, pretty short, a nice ending with a plot that borders on the mundane and fantastic.

[Sho Nagata · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bet I missed an important philosophical or political point

Go to hear for more:
https://youtu.be/OsFeGtaaV_o

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty Language but feels unfinished. Half the characters are forgotten or just not characterized.

[ju ❊ · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Leído para Literatura Alemana]

[Nahom Berta · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.