Literary Encyclopedia: head

Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young

Werther]
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
(1774)

Gerhart Hoffmeister, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara

Domain: Literature. Genre: Novel. Country: Germany, Continental Europe.

Goethe’s first novel was published when he was twenty-five: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
[The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774; final version 1787]. The text caused a sensation at the
height of the Sturm und Drang [Storm and Stress] period that was to inspire a flood of imitations
and emulations in all literary genres in Germany and abroad, including the worlds of fashion
(Werther’s dress of blue coat and yellow trousers), perfume (eau de Werther), porcelain, and
opera (Jules Massenet’s Werther, 1892) well into the twentieth century. Among the reasons for
Werther becoming a bestseller of the times is its portrayal of an essentially romantic hero,
artistically inclined and gifted with deep, pure sentiment and penetrating intelligence, who loses
himself in fantastic dreams, undermines himself with speculative thought until finally, torn by
hopeless passions, especially by infinite love, he shoots himself in the head. Here (letter
1/6/1774) Goethe neither mentions the various steps in Werther’s downward spiral, nor does he
indicate the consummate shape Werther gave to his own life’s experiences and literary models.
The way in which he forged these various strains together was decisive for the success of his
novel, which even Napoleon is said to have read seven times like an investigating judge
(Goethe’s audience with Napoleon, Erfurt 1808).

Werther’s letters in Book One, dated May through September 1771 and addressed to his friend
Wilhelm, tell of his encounter with Lotte. Although he learns that she is promised to Albert, he
falls hopelessly in love with her at a ball and afterwards remains in a love triangle until he
decides to tear himself away. Book Two opens in October 1771 and ends in December 1772, with
a fictional editor stepping in who presents the final letters and notes Werther left behind.
Hastening his demise were these episodes: as a bourgeois employee at a ministerial legation he
experienced a snub at a courtly festivity, handed in his resignation, stayed at a princely castle
without feeling at ease, and finally responded to his memories of Lotte which drew him back to
her town. Yet in his absence she had married Albert. Werther’s passion drove him to destructive
impulses. Finally, he borrowed Albert’s pistols from Lotte, claiming to sacrifice his life for her
happiness.

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Composing Werther was for Goethe a therapeutic process to overcome his own desperate love
affair with Charlotte Buff in Wetzlar, who was betrothed to Johann Kestner. In an ingenious
move he allowed his protagonist to vent his own heartfelt emotions and to describe his increasing
turn toward a pathological state of mind. Nourishing Werther like a pelican with his very blood,
Goethe projected his own disease onto his alter ego Werther whose death is closely modelled on
the suicide of a Wetzlar acquaintance named Jerusalem. Only through this cathartic creative
process Goethe was able to escape the waves of death that engulfed him. At the same time he
accomplished the transformation of life into the realm of fiction, injecting it with such genuine
fervor that Werther touched its readers not as one of the traditional didactic novels, but as a true
confession of a heart in distress. Realizing that his readers tried to transpose fiction back into
reality, asking who Lotte was, where she lived, and even attempting to shoot themselves, Goethe
was aghast about the public’s inability to appreciate literature on its own terms. Had he not
assumed the role of an objective editor, thereby distancing himself from his doomed fictional
Werther? The name Mr. Worthy itself, carrying both the connotation of compassion and a twinge
of irony, should have been an important indicator. For the text’s second edition (1775) he added
an explicit warning not to follow Werther but to be a man.

As a literary text, Werther invites many layers of interpretation, some of which focus on the
question of why the protagonist kills himself. Is it the sacrifice of an unrequited lover? At closer
reading it is clear that Werther was doomed from the very beginning. His sole pride is his heart,
source of all his happiness and torment. With fantastic dreams filling it, he withdraws into a
wondrous world within, escaping from an unsustainable conflict between the harsh present the
fate of man is a prison and his longing for communion with divine infinity. The strong appeal of
Werther to the reader derives from this eternal romantic sensibility: never to be content with what
he has, instead to follow the perpetual quest of an ideal. Even prior to his fatal love, serious
clashes with reality had rendered his existence fragile and vulnerable.

Werther loves to commune with Nature, yet this does not provide lasting comfort, because Nature
is in constant flux. As Nature turns from spring to fall and winter, Werther’s dying self mirrors
the death and destruction of Nature. With communion breaking down, Nature still retains its
function as a gauge of his state of mind and, more significantly, its seasonal rhythms foreshadow
his end. Werther claims to be a genius who scorns any mastery of technical skills in favor of an
ingenious feeling for and inspiration by Nature. Yet losing his grip on his creative faculty turns
him into a platonic artist who rather enjoys than creates art and prefers to paint pictures in his
imagination. From his self-image as a genius he derives his feeling of superiority over the
philistines among the nobility and the middle class. As a member of the latter, highly educated
and with artistic aspirations, he tries to find his rightful place in the system, but is barred from
participating in the political process. Not surprisingly, Napoleon asked Goethe whether he had
not confused two very different motifs in Werther’s decline: frustrated social ambition and
passionate love.

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What sustains Werther, beside the sweet feeling of freedom that he can quit anytime, is his love,
next to Nature a means to approach infinity. When romantic love grows into a total,
quasi-mystical experience and a substitute for religion, its effect on Werther is predictable: it
cures him, even restores a healthy relationship to the world, and raises his self-esteem to the
degree of worshipping himself along with his beloved. But woe to him when this spiritual
harmony cracks under the stress of the physical effects of carnal desire and of the ensuing rivalry
between the two men. Harmony crumbles, Werther strives in vain to maintain his balance, and
gradually approaches a breaking point, becoming more possessive, aggressive, sensual (see the
motif of the kiss), and eventually destructive. His destructiveness could easily have turned
against Albert, but the fact that he turns against himself and perhaps even against Lotte raises
interesting questions.

What is death to Werther? Death beckons him to a world of ecstasy and bliss as in an erotic
embrace where love and death fuse. Death appears to be an act of love with the explicit purpose
of making Lotte happy through his Christ-like sacrifice. On the verge of madness, suicide seems
the only means to avoid the total disintegration of his self; paradoxically he attempts to maintain
his self through self-destruction. In this sense, Werther’s journey leads from initial bliss to
suffering in his quest for self-awareness and transcendence through death. Simultaneously, he
destroys his life in order to shoot his way back into the lap of his family (to Lotte and her mother
in the afterlife). Werther wants to be pigeonholed (Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 1979).
Yet underneath this veneer lurks a darker reality: his revenge on people who are happy. Procuring
the pistols from Lotte and thus leaving behind evidence of their love, reveals Werther’s desire to
make her suffer. She almost dies. His refined sensibility and the professed enthusiasm of an
eternal lover appears to hide a self-absorbed narcissist who enjoys inflicting pain upon himself
and, in a sadistic twist, also on her. With W. H. Auden one could conclude that Werther is
essentially a horrid little monster, incapable of love because he cares for nobody and nothing but
himself.

When Werther claims that She would have been happier with me than with him [Albert] (29
July), he does not realize how unsuitable he is for married life. From the outset he tries to avoid
any decision that would derail his desire for a sanctified love beyond the realm of reality, because
this allows him to relish his suffering. He did fall in love with an idealized image of Lotte, the
divine lady of solace, which he uses to keep himself alive. Lotte motherly, down-to-earth, and
rightfully tormenting herself for having led him on for too long fully understands that he does not
desire her as a real person: I fear, it is only the impossibility of possessing me that makes your
desire for me so strong (20 Dec.). Seen in this light, it is wrong to blame Lotte for his death. She
offers a last hope for an alienated genius who is torn apart (zerrissen) in the conflict between the
stable and unyielding social class system of feudalism (before the French Revolution) and a
world of freedom in which he might find a suitable place for his talents. As a consequence he
fails as a genius, as a member of society, as a lover of nature and of Lotte, and he even botches
his suicide. André Gide remarks: I had forgotten how long it took him to die (Journal, 1940).
Søren Kierkegaard sums up his case: despair is a disease of the mind rooted in the desperate will
of the individual to be himself; he who isolates himself constructs a world within at the expense

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of the real world (Sickness unto Death, 1849). Still and despite his failures, a glimmer of tragic
greatness surrounds Werther’s fate because he never compromises his ideals. This may be the
reason why Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz refers to him as a crucified Prometheus. There is little
doubt that society carries some blame for Werther’s fatal retreat into his inner world.

It should be noted that Werther’s correspondent Wilhelm never responds in letters of his own, so
that Werther, left to his own devices, is unable to complete his life story without the help of the
editor. Through the epistolary form, both author and reader are able to identify with a process of
confession that sets a strong claim to psychological authenticity along with a powerful claim on
the reader’s heart. Goethe’s choice of letters without response as a narrative device reduces the
plot to a large extent to the analysis of the soul and serves as an additional factor in Werther’s
downfall, because his letters prevent him from real growth and genuine self-perception. A critical
respondent would have helped in establishing some distance from Werther’s self-absorption. The
more he writes, the more he approaches doom: a fact that is reflected in his increasingly
disjointed entries and monologues. Moreover, the deeper Werther delves into his reading, the
more it also contributes to sealing his fate. Werther begins his tale, Homer in hand, with his
experience of a patriarchal idyll; this leads to a first union of souls after a thunderstorm in the
manner of F. G. Klopstock and spirals downward to a lengthy recitation of Ossian’s poems that
envelop Werther and Lotte in a cloud of piercing regret and sadness (Matthew Arnold, 1866),
until he finally ends his life with G. E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772) on his nightstand: a
tragedy in which Emilia persuades her father to kill her in order to preserve her virtue.

Thus it appears that Werther’s fatal disease has many roots, foremost among them his conflict
with the restrictions imposed by society and his retreat into himself which is, in turn, reinforced
by a fashionable trend in literature that Goethe diagnoses as the English disease, a phase marked
by Graveyard Poetry between the 1720s and 1760s. England also provided a revolutionary
re-evaluation of the notion of genius as inspired by nature and superior to philistines (Edward
Young) as well as the first models of epistolary novels (see Richardson’s Pamela, 1740) and of
popular depictions of life in a parsonage (see Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766; compare
Werther, Book I, 1 July).

Goethe also integrated his own readings in the text. With his aspiration to reach transcendence
through suffering, does Werther not appear as a middle-class latter-day Tristan? And does not his
worship of Lotte as a divine lady with sacred hands and an angelic voice remind one of Petrarch
and Laura? Finally, how much of Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse (1759) with its effusion
of love-letters, adoration of nature and hatred of civilization was absorbed in Werther?

Not surprisingly, with these literary traditions fused into one masterpiece, Werther’s impact on
European literature was immense. The French critic Sainte-Beuve asserted a strong connection
between Hamlet, Werther, Childe Harold, les Renés purs (Causeries, 1856), thus establishing a
line of literary descendency from Shakespeare and Goethe to Byron and Chateaubriand. He
forgot to mention the Italian classic Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo (1796) with
its move away from identity problems to political protest and sacrifice, as well as the Polish

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dramatic poem Dziady by Adam Mickiewcz (1823-32) with its romantic hero Gustav . Despite
some attempts to break away from Werther types Lensky in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1830),
Musset’s Confessions d’un enfant du siècle (1836) Werther re-emerged around 1900 in Joaquín
Dicenta’s play El Suicidio de Werther (1887) and in André Gide’s Cahiers d’André Walter
(1891). The most recent proof of Werther’s endurance as a recurrent literary character is Ulrich
Plenzdorf’s novel Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. [The New Sufferings of Young W., 1972]. In
Plenzdorf’s text the young outsider tries to unhinge the Communist system of the GDR through
intensely emotional Werther quotations and, after some initial reluctance, ends his life true to his
model.

Gerhart Hoffmeister, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara

First published 17 June 2004

Citation: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young
Werther]". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 June 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5596, accessed 13 August 2010.]

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