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The Sorrows of Young Werther

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The Sorrows of Young Werther (German: Die

Leiden des jungen Werthers) is an epistolary, The Sorrows of Young Werther[1]
loosely autobiographical novel by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774. A
revised edition followed in 1787. It was one of
the most important novels of the Sturm und
Drang period in German literature, and
influenced the later Romantic movement in
literature.

Goethe, twenty-four years old at the time,

First print 1774
finished Werther in six weeks of intensive
writing in JanuaryMarch 1774.[1] It instantly Author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[1]
put him among the foremost international Original title Die Leiden des jungen
literary celebrities, and remains the best known Werthers[1]
of his works to the general public.[1][2] Towards
Country Germany
the end of Goethe's life, a personal visit to
Weimar became a crucial stage in any young Language German
man's Grand Tour of Europe. Genre Epistolary novel[1]
Publisher Weygand'sche Buchhandlung,
Leipzig
Contents Publication date 29 September 1774, revised ed.
1787[2]
1 Plot summary
Published in 1779[2]
2 Effect on Goethe
English
3 Cultural impact
4 Alternative versions and appearances
5 Translations
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

Plot summary
Most of The Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a
young artist of a sensitive and passionate temperament, to his friend Wilhelm. These give an
intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on Garbenheim, near

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Wetzlar), whose peasants have enchanted him with their simple

ways. 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 beforehand
that she is engaged to a man named Albert eleven years her
senior.[3]

Despite the pain it causes him, Werther spends the next few
months cultivating a close friendship with them both. His
sorrow eventually becomes so unsupportable that he is forced to Charlotte at Werther's grave
leave Wahlheim for Weimar, where he makes the acquaintance
of Frulein von B. He suffers great embarrassment when he
forgetfully visits a friend 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. Every day becomes a torturing reminder that Charlotte will never be able to requite his
love. She, out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, decides that Werther must not visit
her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after he
recites to her a passage of his own Ossian's translation.

Even before that incident, Werther had hinted at the idea that one member of the love triangle
Charlotte, Albert or Werther himself had to die to resolve the situation. Unable to hurt anyone
else or seriously consider murder, Werther sees no other choice but to take 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 and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but does not die until twelve
hours later. He is buried under a linden tree that he has mentioned frequently in his letters. The
funeral is not attended by any clergy, or by Albert or Charlotte. The book ends with an intimation
that Charlotte may die of a broken heart. "I shall say nothing of... Charlotte's grief.... Charlotte's life
was despaired of," etc.

Effect on Goethe
Werther was one of Goethe's few works aligned with the aesthetic, social and philosophical ideals
that pervaded the German proto-Romantic movement known as Sturm und Drang, before he and
Friedrich von Schiller moved into Weimar Classicism. The novel was published anonymously, and
Goethe distanced himself from it in his later years, [2] regretting the fame it had brought him and the
consequent attention to his own youthful love of Charlotte Buff. He wrote Werther at the age of
twenty-four, and yet this was what all some of his visitors in his old age knew him for. He even
denounced the Romantic movement as "everything that is sick."[4]

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,

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Goethe substantially reworked the book for the 1787 edition[2] and
acknowledged the great personal and emotional influence that The
Sorrows of Young Werther could exert on forlorn young lovers who
discovered it. As he commented to his secretary in 1821, "It must be
bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as
though Werther had been written exclusively for him." Even fifty years
after the book's publication, Goethe wrote in a conversation with
Eckermann about the emotional turmoil he had gone through while
writing the book: "That was a creation which I, like the pelican, fed
with the blood of my own heart."[5]
Goethe portrait in profile

Cultural impact
The Sorrows of Young Werther turned Goethe, previously an unknown author, into a celebrated one
almost overnight. Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature,
having written a Goethe-inspired soliloquy in his youth and carried Werther with him on his
campaigning to Egypt. It also started the phenomenon known as the "Werther Fever", which caused
young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel.[6][7]
Items of merchandising such as prints, decorated Meissen porcelain and even a perfume were
produced.[8]

The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide. 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.[8]
It was also watched with fascination by fellow authors. One of whom, 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, having realized what Werther is up to, loaded chicken's blood
into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther's suicide, and happily concedes Lotte to him. After some
initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society
as a respectable citizen.[9]

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,[10] 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 his collection of short and
critical poems, the Xenien, and his play Faust.

Alternative versions and appearances

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Frankenstein's monster finds the book in a leather portmanteau,
along with two others Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and Milton's

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Paradise Lost. He sees Werther's case as similar to his own, of one rejected by those he loved.
The book influenced Ugo Foscolo's The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, which tells of a young
man who commits suicide, out of desperation caused not only by love, but by the political
situation of Italy before the Unification. This is taken to be the first Italian epistolary novel.
Thomas Carlyle, who incidentally translated Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister into English,
frequently refers to and parodies Werther's relationship in his 1836 novel Sartor Resartus.
The statistician Karl Pearson's first book was The New Werther.
Goethe's work was the basis for the 1892 opera Werther by Jules Massenet.
William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a poem satirizing Goethe's story entitled Sorrows of
Werther.
Thomas Mann's 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar recounts a fictional reunion between Goethe and
his youthful passion, Charlotte Buff.
An episode in the TV series History Bites features the book, with Bob Bainborough as
Goethe.
Ulrich Plenzdorf, a GDR poet, wrote a satirical novel (and play) called Die neuen Leiden des
jungen W. ("The New Sorrows of Young W."), transposing the events into an East German
setting, with the protagonist as an ineffectual teenager rebelling against the system.[11]
In William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, the novel appears next to Harrington's
unsealed suicide note.
The 2010 German film Goethe! is a fictional account of the relations between the young
Goethe, Charlotte Buff and her fianc Kestner, which at times draws on that of Werther,
Charlotte and Albert.
The 2014 novel The Sorrows of Young Mike by John Zelazny is a loosely autobiographical
parody of Goethe's novel.[12]

Translations
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Dover Thrift Editions, tr. Thomas Carlyle, R. Dillon Boylan,
Dover Publications, 2002 [1902], ISBN 0-486-42455-3; originally publ. by CT Brainard.
The Sufferings of Young Werther, tr. Harry Steinhauer, New York: WW Norton & Co, 1970,
ISBN 0-393-09880-X.
The Sorrows of Young Werther, & Novelle, Classics Edition, tr. Elizabeth Mayer, Louise
Bogan; poems transl. & foreword W. H. Auden, Vintage Books, June 1990 [1971],
ISBN 0-679-72951-8; originally publ. by Random House.
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Classics Library Complete Collection, tr. Michael Hulse,
Penguin Books, 1989, ISBN 0-14-044503-X.
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Modern Library, tr. Burton Pike, Random House, 2004,
ISBN 0-8129-6990-1.
The Hebrew translation was popular among youths in the Zionist pioneer
communities in British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and blamed for the
suicide of several young men considered to have emulated Werther.

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See also
William Render

References
1. Wellbery, David E; Ryan, Judith; Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004), A New History of German Literature,
pp. 386387, ISBN 9780674015036
2. Appelbaum, Stanley (2004-06-04), Introduction to The Sorrows of Young Werther, pp. VIIVIII,
ISBN 9780486433639
3. Robertson, JG, A History of German Literature, William Blackwood & Sons, p. 268
4. Hunt, Lynn. The Makings of the West: Peoples and Cultures. Bedford/St. Martins Press
5. Will Durant (1967). The Story of Civilization Volume 10: Rousseau and Revolution. Simon&Schuster.
p. 563.
6. Stephen Payne, Carrying the Torch (Xlibris, 2010), p. 170.
7. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Story of Suicide (Norton, 1990), p. 228.
8. Furedi, Frank (2015). "The Media's First Moral Panic". History Today. 65 (11).
9. Friedrich Nicolai: Freuden des jungen Werthers. Leiden und Freuden Werthers des Mannes. Voran und
zuletzt ein Gesprch. Klett, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-353600-9
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, David Luke (1964), Goethe: with plain prose translations of each poem
(in German), ISBN 9780140420746, retrieved 1 December 2010
11. Ulrich Plensdorf, tr. Romy Fursland: The New Sorrows of Young W. (London: Pushkin Press, 2015).
12. Andrew Travers, "In Aspenite's debut novel, a Goethe hero lost at sea," (http://www.aspentimes.com
/news/13245454-113/goethe-aspen-mike-novel) The Aspen Times, October 3, 2014.

Auden, Wystan Hugh (1971), Foreword, Toronto, Canada: Random House, Inc.
Herold, J. Christopher (1963). The Age of Napoleon. American Heritage Inc.
Wilkinson, William Cleaver (1887), Classic German Course in English, Chautauqua Press,
retrieved 2007-03-16

External links
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers Wikimedia Commons
(http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/goethe/werther/1wert001.htm) has media related to Die
Leiden des jungen
The Sorrows of Young Werther at Project Gutenberg Werthers.
Free Audiobook (http://librivox.org/die-leiden-des-jungen-
werthers-by-johann-wolfgang-von-goethe/) from LibriVox Wikiquote has
(http://librivox.org) (German) quotations related to:
The Sorrows of Young Werther (https://librivox.org The Sorrows of Young
/the-sorrows-of-young-werther-by-johann-wolfgang- Werther
von-goethe/) Free Audio in English
What Werther Went Through Wikisource has
original text related to
(http://www.wertherblog.com) (21st-century update,

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published in "real-time" online and via personalised this article:

emails) The Sorrows of
William Makepeace Thackeray's poem "Sorrows of Young Werther
Werther" (http://www.bartleby.com/246/566.html)

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oldid=768273110"

Categories: The Sorrows of Young Werther Fictional characters who committed suicide
1774 novels Epistolary novels Knstlerroman Novels about artists
Novels by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Romanticism Sentimental novels Suicide in fiction
Young adult novels Wetzlar

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