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The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther) is an epistolary
Epistolary novel

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is Letter s, although diary, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used....
 and loosely autobiographical novel
Novel

File:2009 stapelweise Neuerscheinungen im Buchladen.JPGA novel is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern Romance and in the tradition of the novella....
 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

was a Germans writer and according to George Eliot, "Germany's greatest man of letters? and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, humanism and science....
, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang
Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements....
 period in German literature
German literature

German literature comprises those literature texts written in the German language.This includes literature written in Germany itself as well as German-language Swiss literature and Austrian literature, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora....
, and it also influenced the later Romantic
Romanticism

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution....
 literary movement.

The book made Goethe one of the first true international literary celebrities.






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Encyclopedia


The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther) is an epistolary
Epistolary novel

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is Letter s, although diary, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used....
 and loosely autobiographical novel
Novel

File:2009 stapelweise Neuerscheinungen im Buchladen.JPGA novel is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern Romance and in the tradition of the novella....
 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

was a Germans writer and according to George Eliot, "Germany's greatest man of letters? and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, humanism and science....
, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang
Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements....
 period in German literature
German literature

German literature comprises those literature texts written in the German language.This includes literature written in Germany itself as well as German-language Swiss literature and Austrian literature, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora....
, and it also influenced the later Romantic
Romanticism

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution....
 literary movement.

The book made Goethe one of the first true international literary celebrities. Toward the end of his life, a personal visit to Weimar
Weimar

Weimar is a city in Germany. It is located in the States of Germany of Thuringia , north of the Th?ringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle, Saxony-Anhalt and Leipzig....
 became crucial to any young man's tour of Europe.

Plot summary


The majority of The Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of highly sensitive and passionate temperament, and sent to his friend Wilhelm.

In these letters, Werther gives a very intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on the town of Garbenheim, near Wetzlar
Wetzlar

Wetzlar is a town in the States of Germany of Hesse, capital of the Lahn-Dill district. Located at 8? 30' E, 50? 34' N, there are approximately 54,000 inhabitants....
). He is enchanted by the simple ways of the peasants there. He meets and falls instantly in love with Charlotte, a beautiful young girl who is taking care of her siblings following the death of their mother. Charlotte is, however, already engaged to a man named Albert, who is in fact 11 years her senior.

Despite the pain this causes Werther, he spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with both of them. His pain eventually becomes so great that he is forced to leave and go to Weimar. While he is away, he makes the acquaintance of Fräulein von B. He suffers a great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend on the day when the entire aristocratic set normally meets there. He returns to Wahlheim after this, where he suffers more than he did before, partially because Charlotte and Albert are now married. Every day serves as a torturous reminder that Charlotte will never be able to requite his love. Out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, Lotte comes to the decision that Werther must not visit her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after Werther's recitation of a portion of "Ossian
Ossian

Ossian is the narrator, and supposed author, of a cycle of poems which the Scottish people poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scottish Gaelic language....
".

Werther had realized even before this incident that one of them—Charlotte, Albert, or Werther himself—had to die. Unable to hurt anyone else or seriously consider committing murder, Werther sees no other choice but to take his own life. After composing a farewell letter (to be found after he commits suicide), he writes to Albert asking for his two pistols, under a pretense that he is going "on a journey." Lotte receives the request with great emotion and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but doesn't expire until 12 hours after he has shot himself. He is buried under a linden tree, a tree he talks about frequently in his letters, and the funeral was not attended by clergymen, Albert or his beloved Charlotte.

Inspiration and parallels

As Goethe mentioned in the first version of his Römische Elegien
Römische Elegien

The Roman Elegies is a series of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Along with the Venetian Epigrams, they were written during his Italian Journey and celebrate the sensuality and vigor of Italy and Classical culture....
, his "youthful sufferings" played a part in the creation of the novel. Having concluded his law studies in the spring 1772, Goethe found himself working for the Imperial Chamber Court
Reichskammergericht

The Imperial Chamber Court was one of two highest judicial institutions in the Holy Roman Empire, the other one being the Aulic Council in Vienna....
 of the Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire was a union of territories in Central Europe during the Middle Ages and the Early modern Europe under a Holy Roman Emperor....
 in Wetzlar
Wetzlar

Wetzlar is a town in the States of Germany of Hesse, capital of the Lahn-Dill district. Located at 8? 30' E, 50? 34' N, there are approximately 54,000 inhabitants....
 . He befriended the secretary Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem and, on June 9 1772, they attended a ball where Goethe was introduced to the 19-year old Charlotte Buff and her older fiancé, Johann Christian Kestner. Goethe is said to have instantly fallen in love with Charlotte. Goethe pursued Charlotte and the relationship varied between friendship and rejection. Charlotte was honest with Goethe and told him there was no hope of an affair. (She later married Kestner and had a son, August Kestner.) On September 11 Goethe left without saying goodbye.

The parallels between this incident and the novel are evident. Charlotte Buff, like her counterpart in the novel, was the daughter of a widowed official and had many siblings. Goethe, like Werther, often found it difficult to complete work. Both Goethe and Werther celebrated their birthdays on August 28 and both left Charlotte on September 10. However, the novel also depicts a number of events that have close parallels to the life of Goethe's friend Jerusalem who, like Werther, committed suicide. Goethe was told that the motive for the deed was unrequited love for another man's wife. Jerusalem had also gone on long moonlight walks that reflected his sad mood and had also borrowed pistols to carry out his suicide.

Effect on Goethe


Werther was one of Goethe's few works in the Sturm und Drang
Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements....
 movement, before he, with Friedrich von Schiller, began the Weimar Classicism
Weimar Classicism

Weimar Classicism is a cultural movement and literary movement of Europe, and its central ideas were originally propounded by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller during the period 1788?1832....
 movement.

Goethe distanced himself from The Sorrows of Young Werther in his later years. He regretted his fame and making his youthful love of Charlotte Buff public knowledge. He wrote Werther at the age of twenty-four and yet, most of his visitors in his old age had read only this book of his and knew him mainly only from this work, despite his many others
List of works by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The following is a list of the major publications of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . 142 volumes comprise the entirety of his literary output, ranging from the poetical to the philosophical, including 50 volumes of correspondence....
.

Goethe described his distaste for the book, writing that even if Werther had been a brother he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by the vengeful ghost. Nevertheless, Goethe acknowledged the great personal and emotional impact that The Sorrows of Young Werther could exert on those forlorn young lovers who discovered it. In 1821, he commented to his secretary, "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."

Cultural impact

The Sorrows of Young Werther was Goethe's first major success, turning him from an unknown into a celebrated author practically overnight. Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature. He thought so highly of it that he wrote a soliloquy in Goethe's style in his youth and carried Werther with him on his campaigning to Egypt. It also started the phenomenon known as the "Werther-Fieber" ("Werther Fever") which caused young men throughout Europe
Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
 to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel. It reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide
Copycat suicide

A copycat suicide is defined as a duplication or "copycat" of another suicide that the person attempting suicide knows about either from local knowledge or due to accounts or depictions of the original suicide on television and in other Mass media....
.

The "Werther Fever" was watched with concern by the authorities and fellow authors. One of the latter, Friedrich Nicolai
Christoph Friedrich Nicolai

Christoph Friedrich Nicolai was a Germany writer and bookseller.Nicolai was born in Berlin, where his father, Christoph Gottlieb Nicolai , was the founder of the famous Nicolaische Buchhandlung....
, decided to create a satiric—and happier—ending called Die Freuden des jungen Werthers ("The Joys of Young Werther"), in which Albert, having realized what Werther is up to, had loaded chicken blood into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther's suicide, and happily concedes Lotte to him. And 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 this version and started a literary war with Nicolai (which lasted all his life) by writing a poem titled "Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe" in which Nicolai defecates on Werther's grave, thus desecrating the memory of Werther from which Goethe had distanced himself in the meantime (as he had from the Sturm und Drang). This was continued in his collection of short and critical poems, the Xenies, and his play Faust
Goethe's Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is a tragedy Play . It was published in two parts: ' and ' . The play is a closet drama, meaning that it is meant to be read rather than performed....
.

The South Korean food and entertainment conglomerate Lotte was named for Charlotte (who is referred to almost exclusively as Lotte in the original German version) by its founder, Shin Kyuk-Ho
Shin Kyuk-Ho

Shin Kyuk-Ho founded the Lotte company in 1948, which grew from selling chewing gum to children in post-war Japan to becoming a major multinational corporation with overseas branches in dozens of countries and products shipped worldwide, and is now South Korea's eighth largest Chaebol....
 (???, ???).

Trivia


A major scene in the novel prominently features Goethe's own German translation of a portion of James Macpherson
James Macpherson

James Macpherson was a Scottish poet, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems....
's Ossian
Ossian

Ossian is the narrator, and supposed author, of a cycle of poems which the Scottish people poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scottish Gaelic language....
 cycle of poems, which were originally presented as translations of ancient works, and were later found to have been written by Macpherson.

Alternative versions and other appearances


  • Mary Shelley
    Mary Shelley

    Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel literature, best known for her Gothic fiction Frankenstein ....
    's Frankenstein
    Frankenstein

    Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, generally known as Frankenstein, is a novel written by the British author Mary Shelley. Shelley started writing Frankenstein when she was 18 and finished when she was 19....
    . Frankenstein's monster finds the book in a leather portmanteau
    Portmanteau (suitcase)

    A portmanteau , plural portmanteaux, is type of bag commonly found in England and other parts of Europe, and was extremely popular in the 19th century for travel....
    , along with two others—Plutarch
    Plutarch

    Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. AD 46 ? 120 ? commonly known in English as Plutarch ? was a Ancient Rome historian , biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonism....
    's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and Milton
    John Milton

    John Milton II was an English poet, author, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his Epic poetry Paradise Lost and for his treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica....
    's Paradise Lost
    Paradise Lost

    Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century England poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books....
    . He sees Werther's case as similar to his own. He, like Werther, was rejected by those he loved.


  • The statistician Karl Pearson
    Karl Pearson

    Karl Pearson Fellow of the Royal Society established the disciplineof mathematical statistics.In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London....
    's first book was "The New Werther".


  • It was the basis for the 1892 opera Werther
    Werther

    Werther is an opera in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by ?douard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann based on the German novella The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe....
     by Jules Massenet
    Jules Massenet

    Jules Massenet was a France composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era....
    .


  • William Makepeace Thackeray
    William Makepeace Thackeray

    William Makepeace Thackeray was an England novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satire works, particularly Vanity Fair , a panoramic portrait of English society....
     wrote a somewhat comical poetic version of Goethe's story titled Sorrows of Werther
    Sorrows of Werther

    Sorrows of Werther is a satire poem by William Makepeace Thackeray written in response to the enormous success of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther....
     that captures the desperation, sadness, and also the humor behind this bildungsroman
    Bildungsroman

    A bildungsroman is a novelistic genre that arose during the German Enlightenment, in which the author presents the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality of a protagonist....
     tale.


  • Thomas Mann
    Thomas Mann

    Paul Thomas Mann was a German literature, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature, known for his series of highly symbolic and irony epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual....
    's 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar recounts a fictional reunion between Goethe and the object of his youthful passion Charlotte Kestner.


  • An episode of History Bites
    History Bites

    History Bites was a television series on the History Television network that ran from 1998-2003. Created by Rick Green , History Bites explored what would be on television if the medium had been around for the last 5,000 years of human history....
     features this book, with Bob Bainborough portraying Goethe.


  • Ulrich Plenzdorf
    Ulrich Plenzdorf

    Ulrich Plenzdorf was a Germany author and dramatist....
    , a GDR poet, wrote a novel and a play called Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.
    Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.

    Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. is an analytic collage-style novel and play by Ulrich Plenzdorf....
     ("The New Sorrows of Young W."). It has been called a modern-day Werther.

Translations


  • The Sorrows of Young Werther - ISBN 0-8129-6990-1.
Translated by Burton Pike
Burton Pike

Burton Pike is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph. D. from Harvard University, and has also taught at the University of Hamburg, Cornell University, and Queens College and Hunter College of the City University of New York....
. 2004 Modern Library
Modern Library

The Modern Library, a current division of Random House publishers, was founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. It was bought in 1925 by Bennett Cerf....
 (Random House, Inc.
Random House

Random House, Inc. is the world's largest English-language general trade book publisher. It has been owned since 1998 by the large German Privately held company media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing....
)
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther - ISBN 0-14-044503-X.
Translated by Michael Hulse
Michael Hulse

Michael Hulse is an England translator, critic, and poet....
. 1989 The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection
The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection

| |}Penguin Classics is a series of books published by British publisher Penguin Books. Books in this series are seen by literary critics as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-western origin....
 (Penguin Books Ltd.
Penguin Books

Penguin Books is a United Kingdom publisher founded in 1935 by Allen Lane. Lane's idea was to provide quality writing cheaply, for the same price as a pack of cigarettes....
)
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther - ISBN 0-486-42455-3.
Translated by Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was a Scotland satire writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics the "dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator....
 and R. Dillon Boylan. Originally published 1902 C. T. Brainard Publishing Company. Reissued 2002 Dover Thrift Editions (Dover Publications, Inc.
Dover Publications

Dover Publications is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward Cirker and his wife, Blanche. It publishes primarily reissues, books no longer published by their original publishers ? often, but not always, books in the public domain....
)
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther - ISBN 0-679-72951-8.
Translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan. Poems translated and foreword by W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century....
. Also contains Novelle. Originally published 1971 Random House, Inc.
Random House

Random House, Inc. is the world's largest English-language general trade book publisher. It has been owned since 1998 by the large German Privately held company media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing....
. Reissued June 1990 by Vintage Books as a Vintage Classics Edition.
  • The Sufferings of Young Werther - ISBN 0-393-09880-X
Translated by Harry Steinhauer. New York
New York

The State of New York is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States and is the nation's List of U.S....
: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970.
  • The Hebrew translation ????? ???? ????? was extremely popular among youths in the Zionist pioneer communities in British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and was blamed for the suicide of several young men who were considered to have emulated Werther.


See also

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    was a Germans writer and according to George Eliot, "Germany's greatest man of letters? and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, humanism and science....
  • Sturm und Drang
    Sturm und Drang

    Sturm und Drang is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements....
  • Romanticism
    Romanticism

    Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution....
  • Epistolary novel
    Epistolary novel

    An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is Letter s, although diary, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used....
  • William Render
    William Render

    William Render , grammarian and Translation, was a native of Germany. He was a fellow student at Giessen University with a brother of Charlotte , and was well acquainted with Werther himself....


External links

  • from
  • (German article, )
  • (personalised e-mail edition sending Werther's letters to your mailbox)
  • (personalised e-mail edition sending Werther's letters to your mailbox, in German)
  • William Makepeace Thackeray
    William Makepeace Thackeray

    William Makepeace Thackeray was an England novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satire works, particularly Vanity Fair , a panoramic portrait of English society....
    's Sorrows of Werther
    Sorrows of Werther

    Sorrows of Werther is a satire poem by William Makepeace Thackeray written in response to the enormous success of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther....