Friederike (1932)

During Goethe’s student days in Alsace in 1770, he and his friend Wagner, an eternal student who loves student life more for its pleasures than for studying, ride together to Sesenheim, where Pastor Brion lives with his two daughters, Friederike and Salomea. Hardly have they arrived when the young Goethe is smitten: he has fallen in love with Friederike, and the young woman soon realizes that her Johann Wolfgang is not indifferent to her either. The two young people enjoy a happy time in the parsonage garden and by the Rhine, although Friederike’s mother is far from happy about their relationship, and the imperial councillor Goethe, Johann Wolfgang’s stern, elderly father, views the liaison with suspicion, as friend Wagner rightly suspects. But the real danger to their young happiness approaches from Weimar. At the behest of the art-loving Duke Karl August, the elderly Captain Knebel is to bring the talented young poet to the capital. There is just one condition: Goethe must be unmarried. The young poet is not at all amenable to this, and so he rejects the Duke’s proposal. But because his friend Wagner recognizes the opportunities that would open up for Goethe in Weimar, he asks Friederike to persuade Goethe to accept the offer after all and, moreover, to altruistically give up any future together with the young man from Frankfurt. And so the pastor’s daughter pretends to Goethe that her heart has long belonged to someone else, a certain Lenz. Disappointed, Goethe leaves for Weimar, while Friederike stays behind with a broken heart, suffering in silence.