The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings Read online

  In 1771, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) went to Strasbourg to study law. There, he had a love affair that later inspired the idyllic Dichtung und Wahrheit (1814). He then practiced law in Frankfurt, where he composed The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Goethe accepted an invitation from the Duke of Weimar in 1775 to join his court and for a decade held various official positions there. He spent 1787 in Italy, where he wrote Iphigenie auf Tauris and worked on the first part of Faust (1808). In 1791, Goethe was appointed director of the ducal theater, a position he held for twenty-two years. In 1806, Goethe married Christiane Vulpius, the mother of his four children. In the last year of his life, Goethe completed the second part of his masterpiece, Faust.

  Marcelle Clements is a novelist and journalist who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, and politics to many national publications. She is the author of two books of nonfiction, The Dog Is Us and The Improvised Woman, and the novels Rock Me and Midsummer.

  Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Among her books are In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800, The Representation of War in German Literature: From 1800 to the Present, and (coedited with Patricia Simpson) Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe. Her articles have appeared in journals such as PMLA, The German Quarterly, Seminar, German Life and Letters, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She was awarded the essay prize of the Goethe Society of North America in 2006 and the Max Kade Prize for best article in The German Quarterly in 2010.

  THE SORROWS OF

  YOUNG WERTHER

  and Selected Writings

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  TRANSLATED BY

  Catherine Hutter

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  Marcelle Clements

  AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY

  Elisabeth Krimmer

  SIGNET CLASSICS

  SIGNET CLASSICS

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Signet Classics Printing, August 1962

  First Signet Classics Printing (Krimmer Afterword), March 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-101-63548-3

  Copyright © Catherine Hutter, 1962

  Introduction copyright © Marcelle Clements, 2005

  Afterword copyright © Elisabeth Krimmer, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  The Sorrows of Young Werther

  Reflections on Werther

  Goethe in Sesenheim

  The New Melusina

  The Fairy Tale

  Glossary of Persons

  Notes

  Afterword

  Selected Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  Like many novels that survive their authors and their era to become literary monuments, The Sorrows of Young Werther is so heavily burdened by prestige and official responsibilities that we are surprised to discover it is only 130 pages long, the hastily written first novel of a very young author. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was twenty-four years old when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774. “I wrote Werther in four weeks,” he tells us in his memoirs,* “without ever making a plan of the whole or previously putting any of it down on paper.” The result was a slim book that told an old story: A beautiful youth, who seems to carry some sort of sadness within him, encounters a beautiful maiden. He is entranced by her, but she is promised to another. He kills himself.

  From the very start, the notoriety of The Sorrows of Young Werther flooded its relationship with the reader; that is, long before it became clear that it would be one of Western Civilization’s Great Books, the forerunner of the modern psychological novel and the apogee of the Sturm und Drang movement. It has never been possible to read The Sorrows of Young Werther without the interference of its reputation: It never got that grace period between publication and the moment when fame distorts the relationship between a book and its readers, before the critics speak and the word of mouth builds, before the climb in sales and, eventually, if all goes well, the ascension, the awards, the new editions, the translations, the place in the canon. Immediately upon publication, its success was so immense that its trajectory as a cultural artifact rivaled its interest as a literary creation. It was an instant bestseller in Germany, France and England and was quickly translated into every European language. It was reprinted, pirated, imitated, stolen from. It was retold or continued in thousands of poems, stories, novels, plays, ballets, musical pieces, paintings and prints. Then came the proto-pop products and happenings: There were Werther memorial processions, Werther clubs, Werther china figurines (the first literary action figures?), Werther waxworks, eau de Werther. Images of Werther and of his inamorata, Lotte, materialized on articles of clothing and household implements, “…on fans and gloves, on bread-boxes and jewelry, on delicate Meissen porcelain.”*

  If further evidence was required of the reading public’s limitless craving for all things Werther—or Wertherfieber (Werther fever), as it became known—there was also a fashion for Werther-style liebestod, or love suicide. Picturesque young Wertherians, dressed in blue jackets and yellow vests just as Werther had been (because these items had been touched by Lotte and “rendered sacred”), leaped into rivers and drowned, a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in their pockets. Others shot themselves in the head as Werther had, while sitting at their writing desks on which copies of the book lay open. There is debate as to whether there was an epidemic of such deaths or a trickle, but today psychologists still refer to copycat suicide as “the Werther Effect.”†

  A novel about outsize desire, self-destruction and the need to flee urban civilization can be supposed to exert many types of bad influence on youthful enthusiasts, so it is difficult to imagine which of those themes was considered most dangerous but, in any event, the book was soon banned in several European cities—in some cases for as long as fifty years. There wer
e German towns in which, for good measure, the blue-and-yellow outfit was banned as well. Naturally, such obstacles only intensified the Werther craze, and Wertherians became legion. Among the best known was Napoléon, who said he brought Werther along on his Egyptian campaign, tucked in an inside pocket, next to his heart. In 1806—thirty years after Werther’s publication—while visiting Germany for a congress, the Emperor summoned its author for an audience and told him that he had read the novel seven times. Unfortunately, he had disliked the ending, and then proceeded to offer Johann von Goethe some advice about plotting.

  The influence of The Sorrows of Young Werther on other writers was incalculable and enduring. Many fiction writers have included references to Werther in their work, sometimes distancing their hero, sometimes pointing out a telling identification. (In the latter category, the most moving may well be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, who wept upon reading of Werther’s death. “…A more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined,” the monster tells us.) There has been a prodigious amount of criticism and commentary written about it, and Young Werther and his sorrows are as present in Roland Barthes’ exquisite modern musings on the nature of love as they were in Carlyle’s manly reflections on literary history two hundred years earlier. Many passages became so well known that they were referred to by date—as in the May 10 letter, in which Werther’s oneness with nature becomes clear to the reader: “I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream….” Others are simply referred to by name, like the famous “bread scene,” in which Werther first encounters Lotte giving some children their meal in the shade of two magnificent linden trees.*

  Why did so many of Goethe’s contemporaries want to read a book whose ending they already knew? (In fact, not only did they know the ending, but they knew that Napoléon had disliked it!) And why should we? Why should we see Wertheriana (as it is actually called in some circles) as anything but a curiosity verging on the grotesque?

  All of this reportage and gossip regarding The Sorrows of Young Werther’s publication and reception may seem to be frivolous to some, but the book’s impact on the course of Western literature cannot be understood otherwise. Werther represented much more than a fashion: The colossal, unprecedented surge of youth-culture energy it produced was in itself a transformative phenomenon. When its themes, ideas, characters and style were disseminated all at once throughout Europe, they acted like an irresistible call to the artists who would become the Romantics and the young men and women of the emerging middle class who would be their audience. Because Werther tapped into a previously unknown but astoundingly widespread impulse to leave behind the prevailing Classicist aesthetic—the legacy of the Enlightenment and its rationalism, materialism, its formality, pomp, and enforced dignity—a pan-European generation found its sensibility. The members of the establishment, which had suddenly become the old guard, disdained Werther as a sentimental novel, a much scorned genre, and they were appalled that this paltry work was the very first German book to become an international success. Before Goethe, no one would have assumed that anyone, let alone a German writer, could connect with such immediacy to readers of England, France, Italy and Spain and the German-speaking countries. It was finally understood that Goethe, who was both outside the French-English literary axis and tremendously knowledgeable about it, was a master of synthesis. In the view of many, he remains Germany’s greatest author.

  As if compacted in a time capsule, all the components of early Romanticism are contained within the pages of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Anyone with an interest in this era of fantastic transition can chart the territory: the awed passion for nature, even human nature; the will to access the unconscious; the celebration of imagination and transgression; the sense of the sublime; the transfiguration and exaltation of pain; martyrdom; the reverence for art and the worship of artists as the new heroes, of the rapturous, of the exultant, of the chaotic, of the dark.

  Just as we cannot suspend our awareness of the stature of The Sorrows of Young Werther, we must accept the idea that, like someone about whom we’ve been told a great deal and who disappoints us when we meet at last, Werther may seem disconcerting when we finally encounter him in these pages. Expecting the prototype for the yet-to-be-born Romantic Hero, the precursor to Byron’s tragic and masterful lover, who stands with wind in his hair, gazing out over a stormy sea, we find instead a chatty young lawyer taking a break in the country. Relieved to be alone, he has settled for the moment in a not particularly attractive town, which he never describes. Above all, he presents himself as someone who wants to stay calm. In his letters to a friend back home—although no one we know of has urged him to extend himself—he protests very loudly and insistently that he doesn’t want to be disturbed. We soon suspect that roaming the countryside and inviting rapture by throwing himself down in the tall grass by the trickling stream are a bad strategy for him, if what he truly wants is to stay calm.

  Even today, The Sorrows of Young Werther is often referred to as a tale of unrequited love. But this is a serious misreading of the book, as is apparent to anyone who scrutinizes the opening pages and notices that the young Werther’s sorrows are already fully formed, his tragedy ordained by his character and his past experiences.

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to have got away” is how he begins his very first letter. He is referring to his troubles back home, but is thereby announcing himself from the start as someone who can only flee what he cannot bear. He has no interest in seeming strong, impervious to temptation or disappointment. His is a very different type of masculinity. Like Hamlet, who was one of Goethe’s inspirations, Werther is ambivalent, indecisive, inclined to brood about his torment rather than act to rid himself of it. He experiences himself as unformed, sometimes even amorphous—easily given to fantasies of merging with elements in his physical environment. And clearly, he is what the world would call “unwell.” He doesn’t need Lotte’s love to disequilibrate him—he tells us, again and again, that he is unstable, so raw that he needs the “balm” of solitude. Alas, there isn’t much for him to do, if he is to stay calm. Even reading is a problem, except for Homer in judicious doses. Other books are too agitating.

  My heart ferments sufficiently of itself…. Often do I strive to allay the burning fever of my blood; and you have never witnessed anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as my heart. But need I confess this to you, my dear friend, who have so often endured the anguish of witnessing my sudden transitions from sorrow to immoderate joy, and from sweet melancholy to violent passions? I treat my poor heart like a sick child, and gratify its every fancy. Do not mention this again: there are people who would censure me for it.

  The entanglement with a threesome that will lead to his unbearable frustration is foreshadowed in the very first paragraph as Werther describes his chief reasons for leaving town.

  Poor Leonora! and yet I was not to blame. Was it my fault, that, whilst the peculiar charms of her sister afforded me an agreeable entertainment, a passion for me was engendered in her feeble heart?

  He cues us to note the ambiguities of such relationships, when he adds,

  And yet am I wholly blameless? Did I not encourage her emotions? Did I not feel charmed at those truly genuine expressions of nature, which, though but little mirthful in reality, so often amused us? Did I not—but oh! what is man, that he dares so to accuse himself?

  But for all his grasp of such contradictions, once caught in the triangle, Werther refuses to see that Lotte is seductive, nor how much he enjoys her subtle, playful sadism. Unlike her English and French predecessors, Richardson’s Pamela and Rousseau’s Julie, Lotte often seems less virtuous than perverse in her refusal to respond to the unspoken but urgent desire of her would-be lover. Characterized not so much by goodness as by warmth, she’s a more interesting character than the saintly damsels in distress.

  Many critics—and even more readers—are persuaded that Lotte is moral, pure or, in other terms, passive, that she
affectionately endures Werther’s pathological passion. But with her allusions, her body language and, most clearly of all, with the language of the eyes, Goethe shows us how she arouses Werther. It is impossible not to see her as a tease or, more profoundly, as someone who is just as crazy as Werther. Eventually, Werther’s ineffectual attempts to suppress his emotions, so much in evidence in the first few pages, cease completely. He doesn’t even try to stop his feelings, only to restrain his behavior—to prevent himself from kissing, touching, taking. This has the effect of extraordinarily cranking up the sexual tension in his scenes with Lotte. The more she teases, the more Werther contains his longing, the more lascivious it seems.

  Their relationship has long been crudely sentimentalized as an old-fashioned conflict of sin versus virtue, but a close reading of their exchanges will reveal an entirely different scenario—subtler, more complex and sensual and infinitely more psychologically authentic than the impossible cliché of monolithic male adulation of female perfection. At the beginning of their relationship, the reader can note how often Lotte would place her hand on Werther’s arm, how close she sat to him, how she leaned against him, how she fed a bird from her own lips, kissed its beak and then passed it to Werther, instructing him to kiss it in turn. She really knows him, too. One evening at a ball, they escape from the crowd and go together to the open window. Lotte leans out as a soft rain falls, the passing storm still thundering at a distance. Moved by the beauty of the night, she turns to Werther, tears in her eyes, places her hand in his and says, “Klopstock!”

  “At once,” Werther writes his friend, “I remembered the magnificent ode which was in her thoughts: I felt oppressed with the weight of my sensations, and sank under them. It was more than I could bear. I bent over her hand, kissed it in a stream of delicious tears, and again looked up to her eyes.”