Because He’s Worth It

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 19 · 11 October 2012

From Thomas Diecks

In his review of Stanley Corngold’s new translation of The Sufferings of Young Werther, David Simpson raises the interesting entomological question of whether the Maienkäfer in Goethe’s novel is ‘either an old form of Maikäfer (“cockchafer”) or a misprint for Marienkäfer (“ladybird”)’ – LRB, 13 September. He finds a ladybird ‘more appealing’: ‘The cockchafer is … not a very poetic creature with which to identify.’ Maienkäfer is in fact an old form of Maikäfer, Scarabaeus melolontha, and therefore a cockchafer, as the Brothers Grimm confirm in their German dictionary. For centuries cockchafers have flown and crawled around in German literature as harbingers of summer, as they do in Werther. There is a folk song first written down around 1800, ‘Maikäfer, flieg!’ (‘May bug, fly!’), and a poetry group was named after the insect in the mid-19th century (Maikäferbund). In ‘Peterchens Mondfahrt’ (‘Little Peter’s Journey to the Moon’), a popular fairy-tale, a boy and a girl fly up to the moon with a cockchafer in search of the bug’s lost sixth leg.

Thomas Diecks
Berlin