Read Love is Eternal in German, with English beside it

"Liebe ist ewig" by Wilhelm von Polenz is a novel written in the late 19th century. It appears to be a coming-of-age and social study centered on Jutta Reimers, a precocious schoolgirl in a prosperous Munich household, whose secret bond with an older painter unsettles the family’s comfortable routines. Framed by contrasts between bourgeois discipline and bohemian art, it explores innocence, awakening, and the pressures of propriety through Jutta, her ambitious brother Eberhard, their genial but inattentive father, and the artist von Weischach. The opening of the novel introduces the Reimers family: Eberhard tyrannizes his younger sister Jutta in his makeshift “laboratory,” while their frequently traveling father avoids unpleasantness at home. Jutta slips away to the attic studio of Herr von Weischach, a former officer turned painter who idolizes her as his muse and wavers between grand plans and self-doubt; she revels in his attention and the illicit glamour of the atelier. A lively dinner with the father’s business partner Knorrig reveals wider family tensions, including a troubling letter about the elder son Kurt’s illness abroad, while Jutta secretly embroiders a gift for the painter and drifts at school between brilliance and carelessness. When Weischach abandons his planned “Harfner und Mignon” portrait and instead paints a symbolic scene inspired by Jutta, she feels betrayed and breaks away; he falls gravely ill, she visits his bedside in fear and confusion, and he dies soon after. The household then views his body at the cemetery, his effects are auctioned, and Jutta’s father, alarmed to discover how closely his daughter figured in the artist’s work, brings cousin Vally into the home as Jutta’s companion and guard.

Summary generated automatically by Project Gutenberg.

Read time

396 min

Words

87,104

Chapters

1

Paragraphs

1,875

Price

Free

• German fiction -- 20th century