The story
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is a short novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in Leipzig in 1774 when he was 24. It is told through letters from Werther, a sensitive young man who leaves town for a village and falls deeply in love with Lotte, who is already engaged to another man, Albert. Unable to bear the situation, Werther takes his own life. Goethe revised the book in 1787.
Goethe drew on his own experience: in 1772 he fell for Charlotte Buff in Wetzlar, already betrothed to a friend, and later learned of the death of a young acquaintance, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. The book belongs to the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement, which prized emotion and individual genius over reason and convention, and it owes something to Rousseau's cult of feeling and to the epistolary novel. It was an international bestseller and was translated into many languages. Young men dressed like Werther in a blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and some authorities worried about its effects and banned it. Napoleon is said to have read it several times and discussed it with Goethe when they met in 1808.
Why it mattered
- It made Goethe famous overnight and became the key work of Sturm und Drang and an early landmark of European Romanticism.
- The book made the emotional, self-absorbed hero a main figure of European literature, and inspired later works such as Massenet's opera Werther (1892).
- It prompted early public debate about the effect of fiction on readers, a question still asked about media today.
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