The Sorrows of Young Werther: Goethe’s Epistolary Novel of Youth, Genius and Unrequited Love
The themes of Werther are youth and genius, and it was precisely from youth and genius that it was born. The Sorrows of Young Werther is a partly autobiographical epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774. It is a key novel of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and it also influenced the Romantic movement that followed.
Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
Title: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774)
Format: English paperback (Penguin Classics), 144 pages, translated and introduced by Michael Hulse
Scope: Epistolary novel; a landmark of Sturm und Drang
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/014044503X (ASIN 014044503X)
Letters from Wahlheim
Werther goes in search of his art to Wahlheim, a fictional village where he discovers the quiet life of its people and is dazzled by the natural beauty of the place. Through his letters, Werther tells his friend Wilhelm about his impressions, the experiences he lives through and his feelings about everything around him.
Lotte
A few days after arriving, Werther is invited to a ball, where he meets Charlotte, a beautiful young woman who looks after her father and siblings since her mother’s death. Lotte, whom Werther describes as the perfect woman, loves literature and music, and shares thoughts and feelings with him. But as the days pass, Werther wakes from his fantasy and realises he can never have her: she is engaged to Albert.
Life Into Fiction
Goethe wrote the novel in a few weeks in 1774, when he was twenty-four, drawing on two real events. In 1772, as a young lawyer in Wetzlar, he had fallen in love with Charlotte Buff, who was engaged to his friend Johann Christian Kestner. Soon afterwards another acquaintance, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, shot himself out of unhappy love for a married woman, using pistols borrowed from Kestner. Goethe fused his own feelings with Jerusalem’s fate, and the result was so close to life that the real Charlotte and Kestner were hurt by it.
Werther Fever
The book made Goethe famous across Europe overnight. Young men dressed like Werther, in a blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and there were reports of readers taking their own lives in imitation, which led some authorities to ban it; Leipzig did so in 1775. Sociologists still use the term "Werther effect" for imitative suicides after widely publicised cases. Napoleon claimed to have read the novel several times and discussed it with Goethe when they met in 1808. Goethe himself later revised the book and came to view its hero with more distance.
The Language of Feeling
Werther’s letters are a hymn to nature, to simple people and to the heart, against the rules and hierarchies of society, which is why the novel became the emblem of Sturm und Drang. In one of its most famous scenes, Werther reads aloud to Lotte his own translation of the poems of Ossian, then thought to be ancient Gaelic verse, and the two are overwhelmed. The scene captures the book’s mixture of sincerity and self-dramatisation, which modern readers may find both moving and exasperating.
Echoes
Massenet turned it into an opera in 1892, and Thomas Mann imagined Charlotte Buff visiting Goethe decades later in Lotte in Weimar (1939). Michael Hulse’s translation for Penguin is clear and comes with a helpful introduction.
Decline
The young artist decides to leave the village and take a post at a ducal court, both to forget Lotte and to satisfy his mother, who wanted a safer and more respectable life for him than that of a painter. While there, suffering from class prejudice, Werther learns that Lotte and Albert have married. He goes back to Wahlheim, and there begins a moral decline that makes him question the meaning of his life and his future.
The novel made Goethe famous almost overnight and set off a ’Werther fever’ across Europe. Short and intense, it is still one of the most powerful portraits of youthful passion ever written.
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