La stella e la meteora. Goethe e J.M.R. Lenz

The aim of this paper is to investigate the connections, the affinities and divergences between J.M.R. Lenz’s brief novel Der Waldbruder (1776) and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774). The paper also deals with crossreferences between Lenz's life (in particular, his difficult and ambivalent friendship with Goethe) and his works. From this perspective, Lenz’s novel Der Waldbruder is not only to be regarded as a literary pendant to Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, but also as an indirect criticism of Goethe’s literary views. Unlike the stable narrative perspective found in Werther, the multiple perspectives of the epistolary novel Der Waldbruder offer metatextual evidences to the failure of communication in the world of "Deutsche Misere".