The Sorrows of Young Werther

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The Sorrows of Young Werther
First print 1774
AuthorJohann Wolfgang Goethe
Original titleDie Leiden des jungen Werthers
LanguageGerman
GenreEpistolary novel
PublisherWeygand'sche Buchhandlung, Leipzig
Publication date29 September 1774, revised ed. 1787[1]
Publication placeElectorate of Saxony
Published in English
1779[1]
Dewey Decimal833.6
LC ClassPT2027.W3
TextThe Sorrows of Young Werther at Wikisource

The Sorrows of Young Werther ([ˈveːɐ̯tɐ]; German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), or simply Werther, is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774.[2] It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.[1][2]

The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life and involved triangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Charlotte Buff, and Christian Kestner. The other involved Goethe, Maximiliane von La Roche, and Peter Anton Brentano (who married Maximiliane in January, 1774). Goethe spent the summer of 1772 in Wetzlar, where he quickly fell in love with Charlotte, who was already engaged to Christian Kestner. Goethe pulled away from her after a few months. Almost immediately, he fell in love with Maximiliane, who was only 16 years old and above him in social station, thus setting the scene for another unrequited love affair. Meanwhile an acquaintance of Goethe and his friends in Wetzlar, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, was suffering from a similar impossible love, in his case with a countess who was engaged already. Jerusalem, 25 years old, was a lawyer and minor philosopher. On the night of 29 or 30 October 1772, he used a pistol borrowed from Kestner to shoot himself in the head.[3] These events are fictionalized to describe the emotional tumult of the titular character Werther, who kills himself in despair after he falls in love with a woman engaged to another man.

The novel was adapted as the opera Werther by Jules Massenet in 1892.

Plot summary

Charlotte at Werther's grave. This scene is not in the novel.

The Sorrows of Young Werther, a story about a young man's unrequited love, is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of a sensitive and passionate temperament. Most of the letters are written to his friend Wilhelm, but additional details are at times provided by an unidentified editor. The letters give an intimate account of his emotional life during his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on Garbenheim, near Wetzlar).[4] There he meets Charlotte, a beautiful young girl who takes care of her siblings after the death of their mother. Werther falls in love with Charlotte despite knowing before meeting her that she is engaged to a man named Albert, eleven years her senior. Albert returns to Wahlheim shortly thereafter.[5]

Despite the pain it causes him, Werther spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with them both. His sorrow eventually becomes so unbearable that he is forced to leave Wahlheim for Weimar, where he makes the acquaintance of Fräulein von B. He suffers great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend, the Count of O——, and unexpectedly has to face there the weekly gathering of the entire aristocratic set. He is not tolerated and asked to leave since he is not a nobleman.

He then returns to Wahlheim, where he suffers still more than before, partly because Charlotte and Albert are now married. The unrequited love brings Werther to a state of dejection. Albert becomes increasingly discontent with the persistence of the love triangle and behaves coldly towards Werther, though he remains characteristically secure. Charlotte decides that it is not tenable for her to remain so close to Werther. With difficulty, she tells Werther that he must not visit her so frequently, and encourages him to have greater self-control and move on from his fixation with her. At their penultimate meeting, she suggests that "it is only the impossibility of possessing me that makes this desire so exciting to you", and adds that this observation could have been made by "anyone". He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after he recites to her a passage of his own translation of Ossian that prefigures his death.

Werther has a tendency to suicidal ideation, and he makes pessimistic remarks about life in letters prior to having met Charlotte.[6] Werther himself recognises the situation as being untenable, and contemplates a double murder-suicide, but instead resolves to take only his own life. After composing a farewell letter to be found after his death, he writes to Albert asking for his two pistols, on the pretext that he is going "on a journey". Charlotte receives the request with great emotion, anticipating Werther's suicide, and hesitantly hands the pistols to Werther's servant, at Albert's command. Werther shoots himself in the head at his desk at midnight, is found at 6 the next morning, and is declared dead at noon. He is buried eleven hours later. Charlotte falls unconscious upon learning of his death and the others fear for her life.

Effect on Goethe

Goethe portrait in profile

Werther was one of Goethe's few works akin in style and mood to the German proto-Romantic movement known as Sturm und Drang, a movement he renounced after he and Friedrich von Schiller moved into Weimar Classicism. The novel was published anonymously, and Goethe distanced himself from it in his later years,[1] regretting the fame it had brought him and the consequent attention to his own youthful love of Charlotte Buff, then already engaged to Johann Christian Kestner. Although he wrote Werther at the age of 24, it remained the only work of his with which many of his visitors were familiar, even in his old age. Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then, even denouncing the Romantic movement as "everything that is sick."[7]

Colored engraving of Werther and Lotte

Goethe described the powerful impact the book had on him, writing that even if Werther had been a brother of his whom he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by his vengeful ghost. Yet, Goethe substantially reworked the book for the 1787 edition[1] and acknowledged the great personal and emotional influence that The Sorrows of Young Werther could exert on forlorn young lovers who discovered it. His secretary Johann Peter Eckermann later attributed these comments to Goethe:

[Werther], said Goethe, "is a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. It contains so much from the innermost recesses of my breast—so much feeling and thought, that it might easily be spread into a novel of ten such volumes. **** On considering more closely the much-talked-of 'Werther' period, we discover that it does not belong to the course of universal culture, but to the career of life in every individual, who, with an innate free natural instinct, must accommodate himself to the narrow limits of an antiquated world. Obstructed fortune, restrained activity, unfulfilled wishes, are not the calamities of any particular time, but those of every individual man; and it would be bad, indeed, if every one had not, once in his life, known a time when 'Werther' seemed as if it had been written for him alone."[8]

Cultural impact

The Sorrows of Young Werther became an immediate international bestseller, perhaps the first in the history of literature.[9] The book spawned the phenomenon known as "Werther Fever," inspiring young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel.[10][11] Items of merchandising such as prints, decorated Meissen porcelain and even a perfume were produced.[12] Napoleon Bonaparte considered Werther one of the great works of European literature, having written a Goethe-inspired soliloquy in his youth, and carried Werther with him on his campaign in Egypt. Thomas Carlyle coined an epithet, "Wertherism",[13] to describe the self-indulgency of the age that the phenomenon represented.[14]

The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide, also known as the "Werther effect", whose victims dressed as Werther did and even used pistols similar to Werther's. Often the book was found at the scene of the suicide.[15] Rüdiger Safranski, however, a modern biographer of Goethe, dismisses the Werther effect "as only a persistent rumor."[16] Nonetheless, this aspect of "Werther Fever" was watched with concern by the authorities – both the novel and the Werther clothing style were banned in Leipzig in 1775; the novel was also banned in Denmark and Italy.[12]

Goethe likened his own mood, after completing Werther, to one experienced "after a general confession, joyous and free and entitled to a new life." For Goethe the Werther effect was a cathartic one, freeing him from the despair in his life.[3] But, the work having been published anonymously, his authorship was not immediately known. Some at first assumed its author to be Christoph Martin Wieland.[17][18]

The work was watched with fascination by fellow authors. One of these, Friedrich Nicolai, decided to create a satirical piece with a happy ending, entitled Die Freuden des jungen Werthers ("The Joys of Young Werther"), in which Albert, realizing what Werther is up to, loads chicken's blood into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther's suicide, and happily concedes Charlotte to him. After some initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen.[19] Goethe, however, was not pleased with the "Freuden" and started a literary war with Nicolai that lasted all his life, writing a poem titled "Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe" ("Nicolai on Werther's grave"), in which Nicolai (here a passing nameless pedestrian) defecates on Werther's grave,[20] so desecrating the memory of a Werther from which Goethe had distanced himself in the meantime, as he had from the Sturm und Drang. This argument was continued in Goethe's collection of short and critical poems the Xenien and his play Faust.

Goethe's work also had a tremendous impact on the 18th-century Hungarian writer and lawyer, Kármán József, who had quite a short literary career, spanning only five years. Kármán's most popular work, Fanni hagyományai, was inspired by Goethe's use of epistolary novel and the sentimentalist style. This seminal work in Hungarian literature took him only two years to write. At the time, this movement (sentimentalism) was not as widespread throughout Europe, making his literary work innovative, unique and also the precursor to Romanticism in Hungary.

Alternative versions and appearances

English translations

See also

References

  1. Appelbaum, Stanley (2004-06-04), Introduction to The Sorrows of Young Werther, Courier Corporation, pp. vii–viii, ISBN 978-0486433639
  2. Wellbery, David E; Ryan, Judith; Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004), A New History of German Literature, Harvard University Press, pp. 386–387, ISBN 978-0674015036
  3. Jack, Belinda (June 2014). "Goethe's Werther and its effects". The Lancet Psychiatry. 1 (1): 18–19. doi:10.1016/s2215-0366(14)70229-9. ISSN 2215-0366. PMID 26360395.
  4. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang; Applebaum, Stanley, trans. (2004). The Sorrows of Young Werther/Die Leiden des jungen Werther: A Dual-Language Book. Mineola, NY: Dover. p. n.p. ISBN 978-0486433639. Retrieved 7 February 2020.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. Robertson, JG, A History of German Literature, William Blackwood & Sons, p. 268
  6. E.g. the letter dated 22 May on page 10 of the novel
  7. Lynn Hunt, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, 4th Ed., p.673 (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012).
  8. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, transl. in 1906 by John Oxenford as Conversations of Goethe, comments of Fri., Jan. 2, 1824 (digital publ. by Harrison Ainsworth, 2006) (retrieved 29 March 2026).
  9. Harry Steinhauer, "Goethe's Werther after two centuries," University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol.44, No.1 (Sept. 1974).
  10. Goleman, Daniel (March 18, 1987). "Pattern Of Death: Copycat Suicides Among Youths". The New York Times.
  11. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Story of Suicide (Norton, 1990), p. 228.
  12. Furedi, Frank (2015). "The Media's First Moral Panic". History Today. 65 (11).
  13. Cumming, Mark, ed. (2004). "Wertherism". The Carlyle Encyclopedia. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 978-0-8386-3792-0.
  14. Birch, Dinah, ed. (2009). "Wertherism". The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th ed.). Oxford University Press.
  15. Devitt, Patrick. "13 Reasons Why and Suicide Contagion". Scientific American. Retrieved 2017-12-04.
  16. Ferdinand Mount (2017). "Super Goethe". The New York Review of Books. 64 (20).
  17. Emma Gertrude Jaeck, Madame de Staël and the Spread of German Literature, p.9 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1915) (retrieved 22 March 2026).
  18. Monthly Review, Vol.72, p.468 (London, 1785) (retrieved 22 March 2026).
  19. Friedrich Nicolai: Freuden des jungen Werthers. Leiden und Freuden Werthers des Mannes. Voran und zuletzt ein Gespräch. Klett, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-353600-9
  20. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, David Luke (1964), Goethe: with plain prose translations of each poem (in German), Penguin, ISBN 978-0140420746, retrieved 1 December 2010 {{citation}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  21. "Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive / Works / SONNET [21] XXI. Supposed to be written by Werter. (Charlotte Smith (née Turner))". www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org. Retrieved 2025-02-23.
  22. Pickering, Amelia (1788). The Sorrows of Werter:: A Poem. T. Cadell, in the Strand.
  23. Werter and Charlotte. A German story [founded on Goethe's novel "Die Leiden des jungen Werther's,"] etc. 1800.
  24. Milnes R. Werther. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Macmillan, London and New York, 1997.
  25. Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (Chapter 15).
  26. cinzia (2017-04-27). "Italian Classic Books: Titles Italians Read in School". Instantly Italy. Retrieved 2025-03-18.
  27. Shapiro, Alexander H. (2019). The Consolations of History: Themes of Progress and Potential in Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung. London: Routledge. p. n.p. ISBN 978-0367243210. Retrieved 7 February 2020.
  28. William Makepeace Thackeray, "Sorrows of Werther," via "Poets.org."
  29. Ulrich Plensdorf, tr. Romy Fursland: The New Sorrows of Young W. (London: Pushkin Press, 2015).
  30. Andrew Travers, "In Aspenite's debut novel, a Goethe hero lost at sea," The Aspen Times, October 3, 2014.
  31. "The Sufferings of Young Werther: A New Translation by Stanley Corngold - Harvard Book Store". www.harvard.com. Retrieved 2023-10-26.