The Sorrows of Young Werther Study Guide

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the son of a wealthy jurist and civil servant who educated his child to follow in his footsteps. Towards this end, Goethe began studies at Leipzig University when he was only sixteen, but soon found that he preferred both drawing and poetry to law. He left college without earning a degree and returned to his hometown of Frankfurt, where he published several poems and his first play, Götz von Berlichingen, which won him his first small fame. The desires of his father remained strong, however, and Goethe eventually returned to academia, earning a law degree at the age of twenty-three. Seeking to set up practice, he moved to the town of Wetzlar in 1772. The experiences he had there, coupled with the concurrent suicide of a friend, formed the semi-biographical basis of The Sorrows of Young Werther, the book that vaulted Goethe into international stardom. Shortly after its publication, a high ranking nobleman became Goethe’s patron and friend, and Goethe soon found himself in a variety of jobs within the government of Weimar. In time, he would be granted nobility himself, and add to his fame with further prose publications, including Wilhelm Meister, Elective Affinities, and Faust. His poetry motivated an entire German movement known as introversion. In his later years, Goethe supplemented his fictional works with well-respected scientific tracts in such diverse fields as botany and meteorology. His wide variety of interests and skills can be seen in the range of people he influenced: philosophers such as Nietzsche and Hegel; composers such as Beethoven and Mozart; and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Enlightenment, with its belief that anything could be understood through empirical observation and rational thought, triggered a new movement in the arts—called Romanticism—towards the end of the eighteenth century. Romanticism was a backlash against the Enlightenment’s rationality, and it embraced, among other things, emotion and nature. The Sorrows of Young Werther is an early and fervent example of Romantic literature. In addition, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was written, the Age of Revolution was dawning, which was a period marked by revolutionary movements in multiple countries that sought equality for all. Coming on the heels of the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution reacted as violently against the wisdom of the previous age, which is also what happens to Werther, a young man discontented with the confines of his own time.

The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired a great deal of what would today be called fan-fiction: writing that makes use of existing characters and stories in new, inventive ways. Examples of this include poems such as “Lotte by Werther’s Grave” by Karl von Reitzenstein, so popular in Goethe’s day that crowds would gather to hear it read. Other examples persist even into the nineteenth century, when The Sorrows of Young Werther fell under the satirizing pen of William Thackeray in his poem “Sorrows of Werther.” Nor was the phenomenon limited to poetry. Sir Herbert Croft, using the same epistolary style as Goethe, wrote his Love and Madness in reaction to real-life events allegedly inspired by The Sorrows of Young Werther. Wilhelm Haring did the same in his The English Werther. Goethe himself took up the subject of love again in his third novel, Elective Affinities. Love proved a common theme for many of Goethe’s contemporaries as well, who were developing a tradition that came to be called German Romanticism, of which The Sorrows of Young Werther is arguably the first example. Goethe’s glorification of unbridled emotion was shared by his contemporaries Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Schiller, as well as by the next generation of German Romantic authors, such as Heinrich Heine and G.W. Hegel.