Confessional and political …

… Storm Over Young Goethe by J. M. Coetzee | The New York Review of Books.

In the fourth of his Roman Elegies, written in 1788–1789, in a suppressed draft, Goethe gives thanks that he has escaped from the endless interrogation—Was there really such a person as Werther? Was it all true? Where did Lotte live? “How often I have cursed those stupid pages/That exposed my youthful suffering to the masses,” he writes. “Even if Werther had been my brother and I had killed him,/It could not be worse than this: being vengefully pursued by his sad ghost.”