Lotte Kestner - who inspired Goethe's Lotte in his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, with which the young author gained fame throughout Europe - decides to embark on a journey "to the land of youth": she arrives in Weimar with the desire to meet again, after about half a century, her beloved Goethe. Her arrival at the city's hotel causes a stir. Everyone wants to see the heroine of the great novel up close. And one after another they talk to her about the great man who captivates them all, friends and enemies alike. Thus, gradually, an image of Goethe is created through the narratives of others, which function as mirrors, each reflecting a different aspect of his existence. Until finally, in the midst of this "hall of mirrors," Goethe himself appears, so real that the reader can almost feel his breath. Thomas Mann began writing Lotte in Weimar in 1933 and completed it in 1939. He was already the famous author of The Magic Mountain, honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in self-imposed exile. In 1933, while on a tour abroad, he did not return to his homeland, where the Nazis had meanwhile seized power, resulting in the regime stripping him of his German citizenship. The phrase "Germany is me!" attributed to Goethe, in the seventh chapter of the book, is a phrase by Thomas Mann himself, a comment on the Nazi ban on his return to his country. "Germany," Thomas Mann had said at the time, "is where I am!" "Lotte in Weimar is a masterpiece, perhaps Thomas Mann's most successful work, surpassing Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and the epic Joseph and His Brothers... Perfect in its proportions, perfect in its language, it seems to me to surpass all of Mann's previous books... All together, the production of subjugated literature in Hitler's Germany does not match this unique book from exile..." Stefan Zweig, 1939 "Thomas Mann attempted to show the inner relationship between Goethe's life and the great intellectual currents of his time, which are also our time, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, nationalism, and the criticism that can be exercised on these currents through art."