The Sorrows of Young Werther: Goethe and the fever of passion

In the autumn of 1774 a young Frankfurt lawyer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, published in Leipzig a short epistolary novel that made him famous throughout Europe almost overnight. The Sorrows of Young Werther tells, through the protagonist's letters to a friend, of an impossible love that ends in suicide. Goethe was then twenty-five years old.

From life to novel

The book grew out of real experiences. In 1772 Goethe spent several months in Wetzlar, seat of the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire, to gain legal practice. There he fell in love with Charlotte Buff, already engaged to Johann Christian Kestner, an official who became his friend. A few weeks after Goethe left, another young man he had known in Wetzlar, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, took his own life over an unhappy love, with pistols borrowed from Kestner himself.

Goethe fused the two stories. In the novel Lotte, a figure recalling Charlotte, is promised to Albert, a serious and rational man, while Werther, sensitive and exalted, is consumed by a passion that cannot be returned. The epistolary form lets the reader enter the protagonist's consciousness directly, without the mediation of a narrator who judges him, at least until the final pages.

Nature, feeling and reading

Werther reads the world through his heart. Nature changes with his mood: bright and welcoming in spring, dark and stormy as despair grows. Books too mark the stages of the story. At first the young man loves Homer; in the second part he replaces him with the songs of Ossian, the poems of the Gaelic bard published by James Macpherson and now considered largely his own reworking.

One of the most famous moments takes place during a thunderstorm. Lotte, watching the rain from the window, utters only a name, that of the poet Klopstock, and Werther understands that they are both thinking of the same ode. In that instant they share a literary emotion that is as good as a declaration of love, and once again it is reading that gives rise to intimacy between two people.

Werther fever

The success was overwhelming. Many young men imitated the protagonist's dress, the blue tailcoat with the yellow waistcoat; translations, parodies, imitations and decorative objects inspired by the characters appeared. People spoke of Werther fever. Some authorities, including those of Leipzig, banned the book, fearing it would drive readers to suicide, and the debate about this risk of imitation has never entirely died down.

Goethe himself gradually distanced himself from the novel and in 1787 published a revised version. According to his own account, Napoleon, who met him at Erfurt in 1808, told him he had read it several times and discussed a passage of the book with him. In Italy the work directly inspired Ugo Foscolo, who with the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis created an Italian Werther, marked also by political disillusionment.

Werther belongs to the Sturm und Drang, the movement that in Germany set the rights of feeling and genius against Enlightenment rationalism. With this novel love becomes the place where the individual measures the distance between his own desires and society. It is a decisive step towards Romanticism, which would make absolute passion one of its central themes.