Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

Why it matters

The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary novel that Goethe finished in five and a half weeks, between January and March 1774, when he was 24. Werther, a young artist, writes most of the letters to his friend Wilhelm, and the feeling runs through nature, friendship and an unreturned love for Charlotte, who is already engaged to Albert. It belongs to the Sturm und Drang movement, and it still reads as a close record of a mind that wants too much from the people and places around it.

The novel was published anonymously and became famous almost at once. Goethe later distanced himself from it, regretting both the fame and the attention it drew to his youthful love for Charlotte Buff. Thomas Carlyle coined the word “Wertherism” to describe the self-indulgence he saw in the book’s readers. Wikipedia reports that the novel reputedly led to some of the first known copycat suicides, a claim the biographer Rüdiger Safranski dismisses as “only a persistent rumor”. The book also set a fashion in dress, and Leipzig banned both the novel and the clothing style in 1775.

Notice the form. Each entry is a dated letter, so every mood arrives on its own day, and the reader must assemble the story from what Werther says and what he leaves out. In the Gutenberg text used here, the letters run from 4 May to 10 September 1771, and the file has no heading for a second book. The first book already contains an attempted suicide with a pistol, which Albert stops, so the reading note matters. Watch also how one letter can move from a landscape to a social call within a few lines, and how the mood carries across both.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.