material, most notably in the Protestant Work Ethic. Weber had read the works of Goethe at the age of 14; he used Goethe's conception of human "elective affinities" to formulate a large part of sociology. Walter Benjamin wrote an essay entitled "Goethe's Elective Affinities". Published in Neue Deutsche Beiträge in 1924. It is one of his important early essays on German Romanticism. In 1933, René Magritte executed a painting entitled Elective Affinities. In French New Wave director François Truffaut's 1962 movie Jules et Jim, one of the two male characters, Jim, who is visiting his friend Jules, is lent the book, but Jules' wife, Catherine, suddenly asks him to return it. She then becomes Jim's lover. In Michael Ondaatje's novel, Anil's Ghost, the book is discussed as being placed with other novels in the doctors' common room of a Sri Lankan hospital, but remaining unread. In Günter Grass's first novel The Tin Drum, Elective Affinities is one of the two books which the central character Oskar uses for guidance, along with a book on Rasputin. In Maurice Baring’s novel Cat’s Cradle (Heineman, 1925) Elsie Lawless drolly and accurately comments (in relation to the attractions for Walter and Bernard to women other than their wives) “Quite a case of ‘elective affinities’, isn’t it?” The scene occurs in 1901 just after the Coronation of King Edward VII. References External links Elective Affinities – Peter D. Smith Elective Affinities – The Literary Encyclopedia Die Wahlverwandtschaften Elective Affinities Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. Scanned Version 1809 German novels German novels adapted into films Novels by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Novels set in Germany German novels adapted into plays