The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Summary
Werther, a sensitive and artistic young man, writes letters to his friend Wilhelm from a small town where he has fallen entirely in love: with the countryside, with the peasants, and above all with Lotte, whom he meets cutting bread for her younger brothers and sisters and cannot thereafter live without. Lotte is engaged to Albert, a decent, steady man, and she marries him. Werther stays. The letters chart his orbit around the couple with terrible precision, elation curdling into obsession, until he borrows Albert's pistols on a pretext and shoots himself.
The epistolary form is the whole engine: there is no narrator to protect you from Werther, no outside view until an editor's voice takes over at the end to report what letters cannot. Modern readers tend to split, some finding Werther unbearably self absorbed, others recognising the most accurate portrait of a certain kind of young despair ever written, and the book supports both readings at once, which is why it lasts. It is short, intense and swift, and its emotional weather is so vivid that whole seasons of European culture reorganised themselves around it.
Goethe wrote it in about five and a half weeks at twenty four, building on his own entanglement in Wetzlar with Charlotte Buff, who was engaged to his friend, and on the suicide of an acquaintance, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Published in 1774, it made its anonymous author famous across Europe at a speed with no precedent, and it has a fair claim to being the first international bestseller.
Historical Context & Significance
The response became a phenomenon with its own name, Werther Fever. Young men across Europe dressed in Werther's blue coat and yellow waistcoat; there were Werther prints, Werther porcelain, even Werther perfume. Authorities in Leipzig, Denmark and Italy banned the novel or the costume, fearing imitative suicides, though a modern biographer treats the wave of copycat deaths as a persistent rumour rather than a documented fact. The most famous reader is beyond dispute: Napoleon carried the book on his Egyptian campaign and discussed it with Goethe when they met.
Goethe spent much of his long life in flight from it, revising the text substantially in 1787 and wincing at a fame that never let the older poet outgrow the young one. The book stands at the head of Romanticism, a movement its own author came to distrust.