The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther, 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. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.
The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life, and involving triangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff ; and the other involved Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano, Maximiliane von La Roche, and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem committed suicide on the night of Oct 29 or 30, 1772. He shot himself in the head with a pistol borrowed from Kestner. 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

Most of The Sorrows of Young Werther, a story about a young man's extreme response to unrequited love, 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, 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.
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 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 translation of Ossian.
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 between two linden trees that he had 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."

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, 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 was all for which some of his visitors in his and wise old age knew him. Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then, even denouncing the Romantic movement as "everything that is sick."
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 and acknowledged the great personal and emotional influence that The Sorrows of Young Werther could exert on forlorn young lovers who discovered it. He later commented to his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann on January 2, 1824 :

Cultural impact

The Sorrows of Young Werther turned Goethe, previously an unknown author, into a literary celebrity 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 "Werther Fever," which caused young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel. Items of merchandising such as prints, decorated Meissen porcelain and even a perfume were produced. Thomas Carlyle coined an epithet, "Wertherism", to describe the self-indulgency of the age that the phenomenon represented. When Goethe completed Werther, he likened his mood 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 himself from the despair in his life.
The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide, also known as the "Werther effect". The men were often dressed in the same clothing "as Goethe's description of Werther and using similar pistols." Often the book was found at the scene of the suicide. Rüdiger Safranski, a modern biographer of Goethe, dismisses the Werther Effect "as only a persistent rumor." 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. It was also 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, 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 Charlotte to him. After some initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen.
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", in which Nicolai defecates on Werther's grave, 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.
His 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 was not as widespread throughout Europe, making his literary work innovative, unique and also the precursor to Romanticism in Hungary. Kármán based much of his work on Goethe's mindset.

Alternative versions and appearances

The 21st sonnet featured in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems is written from Werther's perspective, and tells of the unrequited love he feels for Charlotte.
Amelia Pickering's 1788 poem, "The Sorrows of Young Werther", retells Werther's story from Charlotte's perspective.
In 1800, Goethe's novel was adapted into the short story "Werther and Charlotte" which featured in an anonymously published collection of stories.
Goethe's work was the basis for the 1892 opera Werther by Jules Massenet.
In 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 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 Italian unification. This is taken to be the first Italian epistolary novel.
Thomas Carlyle, who incidentally translated Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship 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.
William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a poem satirizing Goethe's story entitled "Sorrows of Werther".
Henri Pouctal made a film adaptation in 1910, considered to be lost.
Max Ophüls's 1938 film The Novel of Werther is an adaptation of the novel.
Thomas Mann's 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar recounts a fictional reunion between Goethe and his youthful passion, Charlotte Buff, as elderlies.
In 1968 Jean-Pierre Lajournade made a metacinematic critical reading of the novel in Werther, a film made for TV infused with the aesthetics and the politics of the time.
Spanish filmmaker Pilar Miró adapted the novel in 1986 in Werther.
Ulrich Plenzdorf, a GDR poet, wrote a satirical novel called Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., transposing the events into an East German setting, with the protagonist as an ineffectual teenager rebelling against the system.
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 fiancé 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.
The story is read to the dragon Temeraire by Captain William Laurence in Naomi Novik’s novel Black Powder War, the third book in the Temeraire series.
In 2024, Young Werther, a film based on Goethe's work, was released, debuting at that year's Toronto International Film Festival, starring Alison Pill, Patrick Adams, Iris Apatow and Douglas Booth.

English translations

The Sorrows of Werter, trans. Daniel Malthus The Sorrows of Werter, trans. M. Aubry The Letters of Werter, trans. unknown The Sorrows of Werter, trans. William Render The Sorrows of Werter, trans. Frederick Gotzberg The Sorrows of Werter, trans. Dr. Pratt The Sorrows of Werter, trans. R. Dillon Boylan

; originally publ. by Random House.
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The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Stanley Corngold
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