The Sorrows of Young Werther ([ˈveːɐ̯tɐ]; German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) 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]
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 (based on Garbenheim [de; it; nl], near Wetzlar),[3] 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.[4]
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
Goethe portrait in profile
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,[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 was all for which some of his visitors in his old age knew him. Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then, even denouncing the Romantic movement as "everything that is sick."[5]
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. 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 Johann Peter 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."[6]
Colored engraving of Werther and Lotte.
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.[7][8] Items of merchandising such as prints, decorated Meissen porcelain and even a perfume were produced.[9]Thomas Carlyle coined an epithet, "Wertherism",[10] to describe the self-indulgency of the age that the phenomenon represented.[11]
The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide. 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.[12]Rüdiger Safranski, a modern biographer of Goethe, dismisses the Werther Effect "as only a persistent rumor."[13] 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.[9] 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 ("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 Charlotte to him. After some initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen.[14]
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,[15] 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.
Thomas Mann's 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar recounts a fictional reunion between Goethe and his youthful passion, Charlotte Buff as elderlies.
A 2002 episode of the Canadian television series History Bites titled "Love & Death" is about the cultural impact of Werther, with Bob Bainborough satirically portraying Goethe in 1780 as a guest on a talk show spoofing The Rosie O'Donnell Show. Goethe wants to discuss his newest work, an adaptation of Iphigenia in Tauris, but is annoyed by having to deal with obsessive fans of Werther.
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.[20]
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.[21]
In the 2015 game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's Blood and Wine expansion pack, there is a treasure hunt called "The Suffering of Young Francois", where a man named François seeks help from a witch to make a woman named Charlotte, who is engaged with Albert, fall in love with him. The witch tricked François, making a Spriggan appear in the state and murder everyone. When François learns of this, he hangs himself.
The Hebrew translation יסורי ורתר הצעיר was popular among youths in the Zionist communities in British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and was blamed for the suicide of several young men considered to have emulated Werther.
^ abcdeAppelbaum, Stanley (2004-06-04), Introduction to The Sorrows of Young Werther, pp. vii–viii, ISBN978-0486433639
^ abWellbery, David E; Ryan, Judith; Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004), A New History of German Literature, pp. 386–387, ISBN978-0674015036
^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. ISBN978-0486433639. Retrieved 7 February 2020.
^Robertson, JG, A History of German Literature, William Blackwood & Sons, p. 268
^Hunt, Lynn. The Makings of the West: Peoples and Cultures. Bedford/St. Martins Press
^Will Durant (1967). The Story of Civilization Volume 10: Rousseau and Revolution. Simon&Schuster. p. 563.
^Goleman, Daniel (March 18, 1987). "Pattern Of Death: Copycat Suicides Among Youths". The New York Times.
^A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Story of Suicide (Norton, 1990), p. 228.
^ abFuredi, Frank (2015). "The Media's First Moral Panic". History Today. 65 (11).
^Ferdinand Mount (2017). "Super Goethe". The New York Review of Books. 64 (20).
^Friedrich Nicolai: Freuden des jungen Werthers. Leiden und Freuden Werthers des Mannes. Voran und zuletzt ein Gespräch. Klett, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN3-12-353600-9
^Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, David Luke (1964), Goethe: with plain prose translations of each poem (in German), ISBN978-0140420746, retrieved 1 December 2010
^Milnes R. Werther. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Macmillan, London and New York, 1997.
^Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (Chapter 15).
^Shapiro, Alexander H. (2019). The Consolations of History: Themes of Progress and Potential in Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung. London: Routledge. p. N.p. ISBN978-0367243210. Retrieved 7 February 2020.
^William Makepeace Thackeray, "Sorrows of Werther," via "Poets.org."
^Ulrich Plensdorf, tr. Romy Fursland: The New Sorrows of Young W. (London: Pushkin Press, 2015).
^Andrew Travers, "In Aspenite's debut novel, a Goethe hero lost at sea," The Aspen Times, October 3, 2014.
The Sorrows of Young Werther Free Audio in English
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William Makepeace Thackeray's poem "Sorrows of Werther"
January 31, 2023
sorrows, young, werther, ˈveːɐ, german, leiden, jungen, werthers, 1774, epistolary, novel, johann, wolfgang, goethe, which, appeared, revised, edition, 1787, main, novels, sturm, drang, period, german, literature, influenced, later, romantic, movement, goethe,. The Sorrows of Young Werther ˈveːɐ tɐ German Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 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 Sorrows of Young WertherFirst print 1774AuthorJohann Wolfgang GoetheOriginal titleDie Leiden des jungen WerthersCountryHoly Roman EmpireLanguageGermanGenreEpistolary novelPublisherWeygand sche Buchhandlung LeipzigPublication date29 September 1774 revised ed 1787 1 Published in English1779 1 Dewey Decimal833 6LC ClassPT2027 W3TextThe Sorrows of Young Werther at Wikisource Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Effect on Goethe 3 Cultural impact 4 Alternative versions and appearances 5 Translations 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External linksPlot summary Edit Charlotte at Werther s grave 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 based on Garbenheim de it nl near Wetzlar 3 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 4 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 Fraulein 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 Edit Goethe portrait in profile 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 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 was all for which some of his visitors in his old age knew him Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then even denouncing the Romantic movement as everything that is sick 5 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 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 Johann Peter 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 6 Colored engraving of Werther and Lotte Cultural impact EditThe 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 7 8 Items of merchandising such as prints decorated Meissen porcelain and even a perfume were produced 9 Thomas Carlyle coined an epithet Wertherism 10 to describe the self indulgency of the age that the phenomenon represented 11 The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide 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 12 Rudiger Safranski a modern biographer of Goethe dismisses the Werther Effect as only a persistent rumor 13 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 9 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 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 Charlotte to him After some initial difficulties Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen 14 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 15 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 EditGoethe s work was the basis for the 1892 opera Werther by Jules Massenet 16 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 17 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 citation needed 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 18 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 19 Thomas Mann s 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar recounts a fictional reunion between Goethe and his youthful passion Charlotte Buff as elderlies A 2002 episode of the Canadian television series History Bites titled Love amp Death is about the cultural impact of Werther with Bob Bainborough satirically portraying Goethe in 1780 as a guest on a talk show spoofing The Rosie O Donnell Show Goethe wants to discuss his newest work an adaptation of Iphigenia in Tauris but is annoyed by having to deal with obsessive fans of Werther 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 20 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 fiance 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 21 In the 2015 game The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt s Blood and Wine expansion pack there is a treasure hunt called The Suffering of Young Francois where a man named Francois seeks help from a witch to make a woman named Charlotte who is engaged with Albert fall in love with him The witch tricked Francois making a Spriggan appear in the state and murder everyone When Francois learns of this he hangs himself The story is read in the first episode of the 2019 series Rookie Historian Goo Hae ryung 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 Translations EditThe Sorrows of Young Werther Oxford World s Classics tr David Constantine Oxford University Press 2012 ISBN 978 0199583027 a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint others link The Sorrows of Young Werther Dover Thrift Editions tr Thomas Carlyle R Dillon Boylan Dover Publications 2002 1902 ISBN 0 486 42455 3 a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint others link originally publ by CT Brainard The Sufferings of Young Werther tr Harry Steinhauer New York WW Norton amp Co 1970 ISBN 0 393 09880 X a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint others link The Sorrows of Young Werther amp Novelle Classics Edition tr Elizabeth Mayer Louise Bogan poems transl amp foreword W H Auden Vintage Books June 1990 1971 ISBN 0 679 72951 8 a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint others link 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 a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint others link The Sorrows of Young Werther Modern Library tr Burton Pike Random House 2004 ISBN 0 8129 6990 1 a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint others link The Hebrew translation יסורי ורתר הצעיר was popular among youths in the Zionist communities in British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and was blamed for the suicide of several young men considered to have emulated Werther See also Edit Novels portalWilliam RenderReferences Edit a b c d e Appelbaum Stanley 2004 06 04 Introduction to The Sorrows of Young Werther pp vii viii ISBN 978 0486433639 a b Wellbery David E Ryan Judith Gumbrecht Hans Ulrich 2004 A New History of German Literature pp 386 387 ISBN 978 0674015036 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 Robertson JG A History of German Literature William Blackwood amp Sons p 268 Hunt Lynn The Makings of the West Peoples and Cultures Bedford St Martins Press Will Durant 1967 The Story of Civilization Volume 10 Rousseau and Revolution Simon amp Schuster p 563 Goleman Daniel March 18 1987 Pattern Of Death Copycat Suicides Among Youths The New York Times A Alvarez The Savage God A Story of Suicide Norton 1990 p 228 a b Furedi Frank 2015 The Media s First Moral Panic History Today 65 11 Cumming Mark ed 2004 Wertherism The Carlyle Encyclopedia Madison and Teaneck NJ Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ISBN 978 0 8386 3792 0 Birch Dinah ed 2009 Wertherism The Oxford Companion to English Literature 7th ed Oxford University Press Devitt Patrick 13 Reasons Why and Suicide Contagion Scientific American Retrieved 2017 12 04 Ferdinand Mount 2017 Super Goethe The New York Review of Books 64 20 Friedrich Nicolai Freuden des jungen Werthers Leiden und Freuden Werthers des Mannes Voran und zuletzt ein Gesprach Klett Stuttgart 1980 ISBN 3 12 353600 9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe David Luke 1964 Goethe with plain prose translations of each poem in German ISBN 978 0140420746 retrieved 1 December 2010 Milnes R Werther In The New Grove Dictionary of Opera Macmillan London and New York 1997 Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley Mary Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus Chapter 15 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 William Makepeace Thackeray Sorrows of Werther via Poets org Ulrich Plensdorf tr Romy Fursland The New Sorrows of Young W London Pushkin Press 2015 Andrew Travers In Aspenite s debut novel a Goethe hero lost at sea The Aspen Times October 3 2014 Further reading EditAuden Wystan Hugh 1971 Foreword Toronto Ontario Canada Random House Inc Herold J Christopher 1963 The Age of Napoleon American Heritage Inc Phillips Mary Elizabeth 1895 A Handbook of German Literature George Bell and Sons Wilkinson William Cleaver 1887 Classic German Course in English Chautauqua Press External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Die Leiden des jungen Werthers Wikiquote has quotations related to The Sorrows of Young Werther Wikisource has original text related to this article The Sorrows of Young Werther Wikisource has original works on the topic The Sorrows of Young Werther The Sorrows of Young Werther at Standard Ebooks The Sorrows of Young Werther at Project Gutenberg Free Audiobook from LibriVox in German The Sorrows of Young Werther Free Audio in English What Werther Went Through 21st century update published in real time online and via personalised emails William Makepeace Thackeray s poem Sorrows of Werther Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title The Sorrows of Young Werther amp oldid 1133144585, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
