Written between parts three and four of the Joseph tetralogy from 11 November 1936 to 26 October 1939 in Switzerland, the United States and the Netherlands as Thomas Mann's first piece of Exilliteratur (literature of exile), Lotte in Weimar is a case study of the intricate relationship between life and art: an attempt 'to vindicate Goethe the artist against the egotism and inhumanity of Goethe the man'. As Mann writes in a letter to Mrs George T. Paterson (29 November 1940), it 'tells the story of the meeting late in life in Weimar of Goethe with the original of the Lotte of . . . The Sorrows of Werther'. Werther (1774) was the first internationally successful work of German literature; its reception has often simplistically equated art with life by identifying Werther's unrequited love for the fictional Lotte with that of Goethe for the real-life Charlotte Kestner, née Buff.

In the same letter to Mrs Paterson, Mann states that he ‘took no liberty with history’. On 25 September 1816 Goethe noted in his diary, amidst many ephemera, only: ‘Lunch the Riedels and Mrs Kästner from Hanover’; and on her part Charlotte Kestner confessed her disappointment with the reunion in a letter to her son.