Analysis

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Immensee is a novella that functions on multiple levels: as a personal story of lost youth and dreams, and as a transformation of the German folk and literary background into a parable of the modern age.

Nineteenth century writers were concerned with the folk poetry and legends of the past in an effort to discover modern meanings in them. In Immensee, Reinhard and Elisabeth are absorbed in fairy-tales during their childhood, but their own lives become a kind of present-day fairy tale. They are never able to recapture the bond they had in their youth. Reinhard goes away to school, and everything during the Christmas holidays—the letters he receives and the baked goods his mother sends him—reminds him of the past. For whatever reason, he is never rejoined with Elisabeth. She marries a friend of his. When Reinhard visits them much later, he is alone with Elisabeth and regretfully asks her what became of their lost youth. There is no answer to this question.

Storm's story is, on one level, a simple and personal one, but on another, it is a metaphor for the sense of loss nineteenth century artists felt over an idealized past. It is also a transformation, in some sense, of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. In the 1770s, this novel was a spectacular success, making an instant celebrity of the young Goethe and basically putting German literature on the map. Storm's Immensee is a more modest, gentler version of the same idea in Werther. Like the German composers, such as Brahms who followed Beethoven but knew they could never equal him, Storm does not attempt to compete with Goethe but provides his own reimagining, incorporating similar elements into his parable of loss and regret.

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