While many of Werther’s qualities, augmented in the revised version, indicate that Goethe did not want us to embrace Werther uncritically, it is also clear that he did want us to feel for his protagonist. As Goethe put it in a conversation with Eckermann on January 2, 1824: “it would have to be bad if everybody did not experience one phase in his life when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him.”* Werther certainly possesses some of the problematic qualities that the older Goethe singles out for sublimation, but the novel also shows its readers that much is lost in such renunciation. Although Goethe’s revisions distance us from Werther, they do not efface all that is unique and attractive in the character, nor do they present Werther’s suicide as the logical outcome of an immoral life—a notion that would have corresponded to contemporary moral and religious precepts. Rather, the text retains much sympathy for its troubled protagonist. Werther is not simply another case study designed to feed the late-eighteenth-century interest in psychological abnormalities evident in publications such as the Biographies of the Insane (1796) by Goethe’s contemporary Christian Heinrich Spieß or Pitaval’s Causes célèbres et intéressantes, avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées (1734–43), a collection of criminal cases.
If Goethe’s protagonist is not a pathological case study, it is because Goethe uses the epistolary form most skillfully. The novel in letters had become a favored genre. It comprises many of the eighteenth century’s greatest literary successes, including Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and his Clarissa (1749), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), which also tells the story of a love triangle, Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), as well as Fräulein von Sternheim (1771) by Sophie von la Roche, whose daughter Maximiliane is one of Goethe’s models for Lotte. The epistolary novel, which casts the reader as recipient of the protagonist’s letters, is uniquely suited to create both distance and intimacy. Because the story is presented in letters, which create a sense of unmediated truth and spontaneous expression, we see all events through Werther’s eyes. With such direct access to Werther’s thoughts and emotions, we cannot but feel for him. At the same time, readers are given hints of a different perspective, most clearly in the editor’s note at the end, but also in Werther’s letters themselves, which repeatedly refer to advice imparted by his correspondent.
Clearly, the choice of genre predisposes readers to empathize with Werther, and the more we emphathize with Werther, the more we are inclined to blame society for his fate. It is not only the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein who weeps when Werther dies. Werther’s resonance with contemporary bourgeois readers has much to do with the text’s ability to speak to the class conflicts of the day. In Germany, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed an unprecedented expansion of state bureaucracies. As all levels of the administration grew, new career prospects opened up for talented members of the bourgeoisie. In spite of these new options, however, old hierarchies remained in place, frustrating many social aspirations. “I am possessed of other potentialities as well, all of them going to waste,” Werther exclaims (page 9). Werther, like many bourgeois males of the time, may have been more talented than his social superiors, but remained confined to his lower social standing by virtue of his birth. We may assume that Goethe, who moved in aristocratic circles toward which he held some reservations, had sympathy for Werther’s plight.
The limits imposed on this new social mobility are reflected in Werther’s thwarted aspirations for a career at court. Snubbed by aristocratic society when he oversteps his rank and outstays his welcome at a party, Werther neither fits into the worthy but stolid middle class that accommodates pedestrian characters like Albert, nor can he find a true home with the local peasants, much as he tries to idealize them. Forced to make his way in a society that both encourages and denies mobility, Werther remains socially homeless. He also remains incapable of political action. Instead of seeking to change the society that confines him, Werther directs his aggression against himself. After he commits suicide, a copy of Lessing’s drama Emilia Galotti is found in his room. This was also the case when Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, an acquaintance of Goethe and real-life model of Werther, killed himself in 1772, but this choice of reading matter goes beyond a mere biographical reference. In Lessing’s drama, the heroine’s virtue is under attack by an aristocrat. Paradoxically, to protect his daughter, the father of the heroine does not kill the aristocrat who threatens her sexual innocence, but rather kills his daughter at her request. Here, instead of political resistance, we find aggression against the self and the family. Interestingly, Werther, too, casts his suicide as a form of rebellion: “Would you call a nation groaning under the unbearable yoke of a tyrant weak if it revolts and breaks its chains?” (page 41).
Werther, who despises social restrictions and longs for self-actualization, is a profoundly modern character. The novel celebrates unbridled subjectivity as much as it denounces its destructive effects. Against the uniformity of enlightened reason that levels all differences by subjecting them to the power of logic, Werther, whose name translates to “more worthy” or “more valued,” grounds his individuality in emotions: “The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone” (page 66). Against the machine-man of the eighteenth-century philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Werther pits his own heart, which he considers “the source of all things—all strength, all bliss, all misery” (page 66). Werther’s invocation of his heart—which annoyed Samuel Beckett so much that he called Goethe an intoxicated dentist—echoes the language of eighteenth-century Pietism. In the age of reason, Werther, who feels the most profound yearning for transcendence, embodies all that reason cannot satisfy. In many ways, Werther’s downfall highlights the shortcomings of secularization.* Isolated in a disenchanted society, Werther proves a true disciple of Rousseau’s “retour à la nature,” even waxing enthusiastic about the joys of growing one’s own cabbage. But his love for nature goes far beyond the mundane. Indeed, Werther seeks the divine in nature:
when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities; when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart and can sense the presence of the Almighty, who in a state of continual bliss bears and sustains us.
(pages 6–7)
Werther’s longing for connection, wholeness, and transcendence, which he seeks to satisfy through immersion in the Golden Chain of Being, Homer’s Aurea Catena, embodies all that is noble and good. If Werther were a man with a feebler need for harmony and transcendence, he would be less troubled. His failure does not originate in the nature of his desire, in his goals, but rather in his inability to fulfill them or to compromise. A somewhat labile Prometheus, Werther cannot mediate between God and mankind. Thus, Werther, who starts out as a believer in Leibniz’s theodicy, in the idea that ours is the best of all possible worlds, finds his confidence shattered as time unfolds in a circle of destruction and death. In this, the novel again echoes incipient sentiments of the time. Many refer to the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 as an event that threw doubt on the existence of a benevolent God. As Goethe explains in his autobiography Truth and Poetry, “by ruining the just along with the unjust, God had not proven a true father.”*
As nature fails to offer transcendence, Werther hopes to fulfill his cosmic yearning in love. Repeatedly, Werther’s passion for Lotte is portrayed as a substitute for religion: memories of Lotte are sacred (page 57), and Lotte’s touch made his clothes sacred (page 108). “There are no more prayers in me,” Werther confesses, “except prayers to her” (page 47). This desire to find meaning through love is again profoundly modern. In his classic Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, Niklas Luhmann goes so far as to claim that the eighteenth century invented the concept of love as passi
on. As the increasing differentiation of society forces individuals to compartmentalize, love is made to satisfy the longing for wholeness.
Werther is a character with profound spiritual longings that cannot be satisfied by the Enlightenment’s form of religion, as proposed by Kant in his “Religion Within the Limits of Reason” (1793). In this essay, Kant reduces spirituality to dry morality and turns religion into a parasite of ethics, in Carl Schmitt’s words. In Werther, such unfulfilled spiritual longings transmigrate to the secular realm in the form of religious metaphors. Repeatedly, Werther likens his fate to that of Christ. Like Christ, he calls out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me” (page 77). Later he casts his suicide as an altruistic sacrifice. However, while Christ died for mankind, Werther claims that he was “granted the good fortune to die for you, Lotte, to sacrifice myself for you” (page 108). Unfortunately, even this pretense does not hold up to scrutiny because Werther’s death is carefully staged to inflict maximum pain on those he leaves behind. It is not only the timing of his suicide, Christmas Eve, that is designed to hurt. Werther also makes sure to leave a letter that documents Lotte’s indiscretion. In the eighteenth century, letters were not private affairs but were frequently read in social settings. Thus, we may be certain that Albert will learn of “the glowing life that I [Werther] experienced at your lips yesterday” (page 103). If we add to this the fact that Werther implicates Albert and Lotte in his death—Albert by borrowing his pistols and Lotte by making her the one who hands him the pistols—then Werther’s good wishes for Albert and Lotte’s future happiness are either deluded or insincere.
Clearly, Werther does not find fulfillment in nature, love, or religion. Unlike Goethe, however, he also finds no relief in art. At the beginning of the novel, Werther is introduced as an aspiring artist in search of “a fulfilling totality of unmediated meaning.”* Werther shares his century’s desire for a language that gives immediate expression to feelings, a language in which letter and spirit are one. In this, he is a student of Johann Gottfried Herder, whose Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) rejects the artificiality of contemporary language and sings the praises of the “natural” language in the works of Klopstock, Homer, and Ossian. Paradoxically, though, the absoluteness of Werther’s desire for an art that transcends limitations is the reason for his failure as an artist. It is because he aspires to immediacy and rejects any form of mediation, and thus ultimately language itself, that he is incapable of executing his plans on a more modest scale: “I couldn’t draw now, not a line, yet was never a better painter” (page 6).
While Werther’s dilettantism prevents him from finding solace in art, Goethe recovers in writing what he had lost in faith. In a letter of August 16, 1774, to Charlotte Buff, another one of the models for Werther’s Lotte, who is indeed a “Venus out of many beauties” (page 133), Goethe calls his novel a prayer book while in Truth and Poetry, he refers to Werther as a confession: “I felt like a man after absolute confession—happy and free again” (page 129). Unlike Werther, Goethe puts his trust in language to relieve his pain. Conversely, Werther’s desire to circumvent mediation through language ultimately reduces him to a world of violence.
At first, Werther’s desire to make do without language turns to harmless physical expression such as dancing, in which he takes much joy. His quest for immediacy is also evident when he reads Lotte’s letters with his lips. Gradually, however, his yearning for physical relief takes a destructive turn. Much like Heinrich von Kleist, who, longing for the same immediacy, wishes he could tear his heart out and send it in a letter, Werther turns to violence. He likens himself to a “noble breed of stallion who, when they are overheated and run wild, instinctively open one of their veins to relieve themselves” (page 63). As his desperation grows, his masochistic, violent fantasies gain in intensity. Now, he longs to “tear my breast and bash my brains in” (page 74) and proclaims that he would feel better “if only I could see blood” (page 63). In other words, Werther dies because, unlike Goethe, he does not know how to sublimate his feelings in language and art.
Although Werther dies at the end of the novel, Goethe could never truly lay him to rest. For the remainder of his life, Goethe was haunted by the text that turned him into a European celebrity—at times he traveled incognito to avoid being recognized as the author of Werther. This identification of author and text is hardly accidental. After all, in Werther, Goethe turned his own life into the stuff of literature. If Werther continues to provoke intense responses, it is because a text that is written from the heart speaks to the heart.
—Elisabeth Krimmer
* Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen. Zusammengestellt von Wilhelm Bode, vol. I: 1749–1793, ed. Regine Otto and Paul-Gerhard Wenzlaff (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1979), page 97.
† “Beyond the Pleasure of the Principle of Death: Anti-Sociability in Goethe’s Werther and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield,” in Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit um 1800, ed. Susanne Schmid (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), pages 32–33.
* Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, vol. 19 of Sämtliche Werke, ed. Heinz Schlaffer (Munich: btb, 1986), page 490.
† Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wirkungen der Französischen Revolution 1791–1797, vol. 4.1 of Sämtliche Werke, ed. Reiner Wild (Munich: btb, 1988), page 496.
* Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, vol. 19 of Sämtliche Werke, ed. Heinz Schlaffer (Munich: btb, 1986), page 491.
* See Astrida Tantillo, “The Catholicism of Werther,” in The German Quarterly 81 (2008): page 409.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, vol. 16 of Sämtliche Werke, ed. Peter Sprengel (Munich: btb, 1985), page 33.
* Scott Abbott, “The Semiotics of Young Werther,” Goethe Yearbook 6 (1992): page 42.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Gedichte (Poems), 1771
Götz von Berlichingen, 1773 Drama
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrow of Young Werther), 1774 Novella
Egmont, 1787 Drama
Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris), 1787 Drama
Torquato Tasso, 1790 Drama
Romische Elegien (Roman Elegies), 1795 Poems
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), 1795–96 Novel
Hermann und Dorothea (Hermann and Dorothea), 1797 Drama
Faust, Part I, 1808, Part II, 1832 Drama
Die Wahlverwandstchaften (Elective Affinities), 1809 Novel
Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), 1811–33 Unfinished Autobiography
Die italienische Reise (The Italian Journey), 1816–29 Travel Sketches
Westöstlicher Diwan (West-East Divan), 1819 Poems
Wilhelm Misters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Travels), 1821–29 Novel
Marienbad Elegien (Marienbad Elegies), 1823 Poems
Selected Biography and Criticism
Armstrong, John. Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 2007.
Bielschowsky, Albert. The Life of Goethe, 3 vols. Trans. William A. Cooper. New York: Putnam, 1905–8.
Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992–2000.
Croce, Benedetto. Goethe. New York: Knopf, 1923.
Friendenthal, Richard. Goethe, His Life and Times. London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1965.
Gray, Ronald. Goethe: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Lange, Victor, ed. Goethe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Lukács, Georg. Goethe and His Age. Trans. Robert Anchor. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969.
Rose, William, ed. Essays on Goethe. London: Cassell, 1949.
Schweitzer, Albert. Goethe: Five Studies. Trans. with an introduction by Charles R. Joy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.
Sharpe, Lesley, ed. The Cambridge Compa
nion to Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Williams, John R. The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings
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