Novel
The New Sufferings of Young W.
Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.
Ulrich Plenzdorf · 1972
Synopsis
After dropping a metal plate on his apprenticeship master's foot, Edgar Wibeau, seventeen, a model pupil raised by his mother, leaves his small town for Berlin. He settles in an abandoned garden shed near a kindergarten and falls in love with Charlie, a twenty-year-old kindergarten teacher, engaged to Dieter. In a coverless book found in the toilet, he discovers Goethe's Werther; he records passages from it on tapes that he sends to his friend Willi. Turned down by the art school, he joins a team of house painters.
Context
The story was first written as a screenplay, with the dramatist Inge Heym; refused by the state studio, the text became a narrative published in 1972 in the journal Sinn und Form, then, expanded, in book form in 1973, in East and West alike. The play drawn from it, premiered in Halle on 18 May 1972, was staged in both Germanys and became the most performed contemporary play in the West in the 1974-1975 season. Edgar speaks in it a youth language invented by the author, mixed with quotations from Goethe and Salinger.
Who it is for
A short text, in which the hero comments from the afterlife on the testimonies his father gathers; it is better to know Goethe's novel.
Prizes and reception
Translated into more than twenty languages between 1973 and 1991, including French in 1975 and English in 1979.