The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  From the start, Werther’s fate is inscribed in his need to go mad with love and lust. He’s had several rehearsals, and he knows…. His madness has only been waiting for that trigger—some equivalent of that exquisite moment of revelation under the linden trees—and now the tale can unfold. Goethe brilliantly demonstrates how Werther’s attempts to dampen the roar of his love by tuning in to the louder cacophony of nature must be self-defeating. The more intense the emotion, the more complete the confusion, the more certain is the sacrifice of the self within the universe’s endless energy. Nothing can emerge from this union with nature but limitless desire or death. Those are the terms, and whether we agree with them or not, by the time we have finished The Sorrows of Young Werther, we understand them thoroughly.

  What of Albert? If Albert, Lotte’s humorless fiancé, did not exist, the lovers, and the reader/voyeur, would have to invent him. Because he is often not at home, but always present in their minds, every glance stimulates. Every touch is inventoried, analyzed, nursed in memory.

  Eventually, both are so sensitized to their own desire and each other’s that they cannot permit themselves to touch at all or, in the final stages, even to look or speak. Because the give and take of lust is never verbalized, because it is never either consummated or ignored, it is constantly expressed. And then at last, as it must, the foreplay turns into fatal longing. The only other option would have been hate, and that’s not what Goethe was interested in writing about. He would not have been so cruel to the lovers or, for that matter, to the reader. Werther must be sacrificed and his desire is so great that nothing will be commensurate but death. Lotte must be punished, and no punishment will suffice short of his death. And finally, Albert, stand-in for all of the reasonable, strong, humorless bourgeois father figures who always get the best of the child-artist, must get his due. It doesn’t matter a bit that Albert has never really come to life for the reader. On the contrary, an essential element to the drama is the insignificance of Albert’s presence. The more seductive Lotte is, the more tumescent Werther becomes, the more it is not Albert but the reader who is the third in the threesome.

  Goethe was so tremendously unsettled by the reaction to The Sorrows of Young Werther that he revised the original work, and what we read now is based on a later, much subdued 1787 edition. The public response—certainly the suicides—scared him, and it also left him feeling insulted that his work had been so misunderstood.

  …Just as I felt relieved and lighthearted because I had succeeded in translating reality into poetry, my friends were confusing themselves that they had to turn poetry into reality, enact the novel and shoot themselves!*

  He was also maddened by the consequences of his sudden, extraordinary celebrity. Understandably, he found it difficult to work when so many people wanted to see him and to talk to him. Worse was the public’s oppressive in-quisitiveness about his own life. He hadn’t imagined that “sympathizing, well-wishing souls were going to become such an unbearable nuisance. Instead of saying something nice about the book just as it was, all of them wanted to know how much of it was true!”† He certainly never denied that Werther was based to a certain extent on his experiences. On the contrary, in his memoirs, he explains that Lotte had been based on several girls he knew in his youth.

  This profusion of Lottes was a terrible nuisance because everyone who even looked at me wanted to know where the real one was…. I hoped I would soon be rid of these embarrassing inquiries, but unfortunately they pursued me throughout my entire life.‡

  Finally, he was led to bitter thoughts, and came to feel that “…the author and his public are separated by an immense abyss, both of them fortunately having no idea of its dimensions.” Paradoxically, he found himself turning away from Romanticism and from the belief in the artist as a hero and in art as salvation. “Writing is a misuse of language,” he would assert. “Reading alone quietly is a sad substitute for talk.”

  It is not Werther but the prose play Faust for which Goethe is now best remembered, but although he had already begun to conceptualize this vast, complex work, it would be a long time before Wertherfieber subsided enough for him to focus on new writing. Part I of Faust was not published until 1808; the monumental Part II was published posthumously. Eventually, he moved on to the drama, poetry and criticism that, together, made him known to the world as the Promethean creator who links the Age of Reason to the present, but for many years Goethe seems to have struggled to accept the origins of his fame.

  …[T]he greatest good fortune—or disaster—was the fact that everyone wanted to know more about the strange young author who had suddenly put in such a bold appearance. They demanded to see me and talk to me; those far away wanted to hear something about me. I therefore experienced a high degree of popularity that was sometimes pleasant, sometimes disagreeable, and always distracting. For plenty of unfinished work lay before me—in fact I had things planned that would take years to complete, even if I applied myself to them ardently. But I had been dragged out of my stillness, out of the twilight and darkness that alone favor the purity of creation, into the noise of daytime, where one loses oneself in others and becomes confused by sympathy as well as by coldness, by praise as well as by reproof.*

  Decades after the publication, long after Goethe’s ascent to the pantheon, he continued to speak and write with regret about Werther’s notoriety.

  —Marcelle Clements

  * Excerpts from Goethe’s autobiography, My Life: Poetry and Truth, follow The Sorrows of Young Werther, starting on page 111 of this volume.

  * Stuart P. Atkins, The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama, Harvard University Press, 1949.

  †The term, coined in the 1970s by sociologist David P. Phillips, refers to suicides that mimic those described in the media. Werther’s is probably still the most famous suicide in fiction, but statistics for copycat liebestod were not available to Dr. Phillips and his team. Instead, they began by studying the response to the huge number of media accounts of Marilyn Monroe’s death, an apt pairing.

  * William Makepeace Thackeray’s contribution to the commemoration of this passage begins as follows:

  Werther had a love for Charlotte

  Such as words could never utter;

  Would you know how first he met her?

  She was cutting bread and butter.

  * See “Reflections on Werther,” page 129 in this volume.

  † Ibid, page 132.

  ‡ Ibid, pages 133–34.

  * Ibid, page 134.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The purpose of this volume is to present The Sorrows of Young Werther in a new translation and to include a few of Goethe’s writings that we feel go well with it in order to produce a book that is an entity at least in mood.

  The effort was made to capture, however briefly, an aspect of Goethe’s vast store of work that is rare in the great men of literature and even rarer in the artistic manifestations of our day, namely, his radiance. For this translator was left, after reading Werther, with an impression of the young man’s capacity to enjoy life rather than of his inability to cope with it and with a memory of his strong sense of social justice rather than of his defeat by the laws of society. Goethe’s attitude toward life, even in The Sorrows of Young Werther, is affirmative, and the “Reflections on Werther,” taken from his memoirs, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), are included here not only to give the reader insight into how Werther came into being, how much of the novel is autobiographical and how much fiction, what the book did for the author and how it was received, but also to illuminate Goethe’s approach to the negative aspects of life. Here he is clearly revealed as the man who said, “However it may be, life is good.”

  It was not difficult to find other examples of Goethe’s deep love of women, of nature, of beauty in art and nature—in short, of life, for it is the mainspring of his work. The Sesenheim episode from Poetry and Truth is included for this reason, and two fairy tales: “The New Melusina,” w
hich is mentioned in the Sesenheim sequence, and “The Fairy Tale,” in which Goethe disguises profound subject matter symbolically and happily. All are love stories. And we hope that the reader may find in them a type of heroine who has almost disappeared from the literature of our day—the truly charming, well-balanced, blithe, unproblematical, and living girl.

  The translator wishes to thank Beatrice Baumfeld for her invaluable help in compiling this volume and in keeping a watchful eye on the true and deeper meanings of words during the translation, and Professor Hermann J. Weigand for his illumination of various difficult passages.

  —Catherine Hutter

  Whatever I could find concerning the story of poor Werther I have collected and present it to you herewith, in the belief that you will thank me for it. You will not want to deny his spirit and character your admiration and love, nor his fate your compassion. And you, my good man, who may feel a similar urge—take comfort in his suffering and let this book be your friend if, through fate or your own fault, you can find none better.

  THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER

  This is another one of those creatures whom, like the pelican, I have fed with the blood of my own heart…there were special circumstances close at hand, urgent, troubling me, and they resulted in the state of mind that produced Werther. I had lived, loved, and suffered much…that’s what it was.

  —GOETHE

  TO ECKERMANN

  BOOK ONE

  May 4th, 1771

  I can’t tell you how glad I am to have got away. Dear friend, how strange is the human heart! I love you, we were inseparable—yet I can leave you and be content. I know you will forgive me. Were not all my attachments designed by fate to intimidate a heart like mine? Poor Leonore! But I was not to blame. Was it my fault that, while her headstrong sister charmed and amused me, a passion for me developed in poor Leonore’s heart? Yet I ask myself—am I entirely blameless? Did I perhaps encourage her? Didn’t I quite frankly enjoy her completely sincere and natural outbursts, which often made the two of us laugh, although there was really nothing laughable about them? Didn’t I…oh, what is man made of that he may reproach himself? I shall do better in the future, my dear friend, I promise you. I shall stop dwelling on the petty wrongs of providence, as has been my wont. I intend to enjoy the present and let the past take care of itself. Of course, best of friends, you are right—there would be less misery in this world if man were not so ever-ready to recall past evils rather than put up with the indifferent present. God knows why he is thus constituted!

  Please tell my mother that I am doing my best to straighten out her affairs and will give her news of them as soon as I can. I have spoken to my aunt and must say that I didn’t find her to be the dreadful vehement woman with the kindest of hearts. I explained my mother’s complaint concerning her share of the inheritance, which has been withheld. She gave me the reasons for it and the conditions under which she would be willing to hand over all of it, which is even more than we are asking. But I really don’t feel like reporting about it now. Just tell her that everything will be all right. And in the course of this little transaction, my dear friend, I discovered again that misunderstandings and inertia cause perhaps more to go wrong in this world than slyness and evil intent. In any case, the latter are rarer.

  And, by the way, I feel very well here. The solitude in these blissful surroundings is balm to my soul, and with its abundance, the youthful season of spring cheers my heart, which is still inclined to shudder. Every tree, every hedgerow is a bouquet. It makes me wish I were a ladybug and could fly in and out of the sea of wondrous scents and find all my nourishment there.

  The town itself is not attractive, but I find ample compensation in the indescribable beauties of nature surrounding it. That was what induced the late Count von M. to set his garden on one of the numerous hillsides that intersect here, forming the loveliest valleys. The garden is not elaborate, and the moment you walk into it you feel that it was designed by a sensitive heart rather than a scientific gardener, a heart that sought to find its enjoyment there. I have shed a few tears myself for the departed gentleman, in the little, broken-down summerhouse that used to be his favorite haunt and now is mine. Soon I will be master of the garden. The gardener seems to think well of me, though I have been here only a few days, and I will see to it that he enjoys working for me.

  May 10th

  My whole being is filled with a marvelous gaiety, like the sweet spring mornings that I enjoy with all my heart. I am alone and glad to be alive in surroundings such as these, which were created for a soul like mine. I am so happy, best of friends, and so utterly absorbed by the sensations of a peaceful existence that my work suffers from it. I couldn’t draw now, not a line, yet was never a better painter. When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little 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 continuous bliss bears and sustains us—then, my friend, when it grows light before my eyes and the world around me and the sky above come to rest wholly within my soul like a beloved, I am filled often with yearning and think, if only I could express it all on paper, everything that is housed so richly and warmly within me, so that it might be the mirror of my soul as my soul is the mirror of Infinite God…ah, my dear friend…but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence.

  May 12th

  I don’t know whether deceptive spirits haunt these parts or whether it is the glowing fantasies of my heart that make everything around me seem so blissful. Just outside town there is a spring to which I feel mysteriously drawn, like Melusina and her sisters.1 You walk down a short slope and at the bottom find yourself facing an archway from which about twenty steps descend to a place where clearest water gushes out of marble rock. The low wall that hems this spot in at the top, the tall trees all around it that conceal the coolness within, all suggest something mysterious. Not a day passes without my spending an hour there. Young girls come from town to fetch water, a simple and very necessary business—in days of old even the daughters of kings used to do it—and as I sit there, a patriarchal atmosphere comes to life all around me. I can see our forefathers meeting and courting at wells like this, and how good spirits hovered over all such places. Whoever can’t feel with me has never refreshed himself at a cool spring after a long excursion on a hot summer’s day.

  May 13th

  You ask whether you should send me books. Dear friend, I beg of you—don’t. I have no wish to be influenced, encouraged, or inspired any more. My heart surges wildly enough without any outside influence. What I need is a lullaby, and I have found an abundance of them in my beloved Homer. How often I have to calm my rebellious blood! You have never known anything so wildly fluctuating as this heart of mine. But, dear friend, I don’t have to tell you this—you, who have so often witnessed my transitions from grief to extravagant joy, from sweetest melancholy to pernicious passion. I coddle my heart like a sick child and give in to its every whim. But don’t tell a soul. There are people who would condemn me for it.

  May 15th

  The simple folk here already know me and seem to be fond of me, especially the children. At first, when I made efforts to join them and ask questions about this and that, a few thought I was making fun of them and were quite rude. But I didn’t let it bother me. I only felt keenly what I have noticed often—that persons of rank tend to keep their cold distance from the common man, as if they feared to lose something by such intimacy. And then, of course, there are those who shrink from all contact with simple people, and the tactless jokesters who talk down to them—they succeed only in making the poor sou
ls more sharply aware than ever of their presumption. I know that we human beings were not created equal and cannot be, but I am of the opinion that he who keeps aloof from the so-called rabble in order to preserve the respect he feels is his due is just as reprehensible as the coward who hides from his enemies because he fears to be defeated by them.

  Not long ago I came to the spring and found a young servant girl there. She had put her water jar on the lowest step and was looking around in the hope that a friend might come and help her place it on her head. I walked down the steps and faced her. “Would you like me to help you?” I asked. She blushed and replied, “Oh no, sir!” “Let’s not stand on ceremony,” I said. She adjusted the pad on her head, I helped her with her pitcher, she thanked me, and up she went!

  May 17th

  I have met all sorts of people, but I have yet to find the right companionship. I don’t know what my attractions are, but many people seem to like me and attach themselves to me. Then it pains me when our paths coincide for only a short way. You ask what the people are like here. All I can say is, as they are everywhere else. There is something coldly uniform about the human race. Most of them have to work for the greater part of their lives in order to live and the little freedom they have left frightens them to such an extent that they will stop at nothing to rid themselves of it. Oh, human destiny!

  But really, they are good people. Sometimes, when I forget myself and indulge in a few of the pleasures still left to mankind and sit down at a prettily set table to enjoy myself with them quite naturally and sincerely; or when I arrange a drive or a dance at the appropriate time…things like that…it does me good. The only thing I must not think of is that I am possessed of other potentialities as well, all of them going to waste, and that I have to keep them carefully concealed. And oh, how this constricts my heart! Yet to be misunderstood is the miserable destiny of people like myself.