The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings
Page 28
The people couldn’t seem to get their fill of looking and admiring. More and more people crowded into the temple, and they would have crushed themselves to death if their attention had not been drawn again to the square outside where gold coins had suddenly begun to fall out of the air. They clinked on the marble tiles. Those nearest fell upon them. The miracle was repeated—here, there, at random. It is understandable that the will-o’-the-wisps, in parting, wanted to play one more trick and squandered the gold they had extracted from the veins of the collapsed king in this droll fashion. For a while, the people continued to mill around greedily, even after the gold coins had ceased to fall. At last they dispersed; each went his way, but the bridge teems to this day with wanderers, and the temple is more frequently visited than any other in the world.
GLOSSARY OF PERSONS
BATTEUX, Charles. 1713–1780. French critic.
CHODOWIECKI, Daniel. 1726–1801. Engraver in Berlin.
DE PILES, Roger. 1635–1709. Writer, painter, engraver.
ECKERMANN, Johann Peter. 1792–1854. German author.
ERNESTI, Johann August. 1707–1781. German theologian and philologist.
GALL, Franz Joseph. 1758–1828. Anatomist and craniologist.
GESSNER, Salomon. 1730–1788. Swiss painter, etcher, writer.
GOTTER, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1746–1797. Poet. At the embassy in Wetzlar.
HAMANN, Johann Georg. 1730–1788. Philosopher and writer in Königsberg.
HEBEL, Johann Peter. 1760–1826. German poet.
HERDER, Johann Gottfried von. 1744–1803. German philosopher, poet, critic.
HEYNE, Christian Gottlob. 1729–1812. Professor at the University of Göttingen.
KENNICOTT, Benjamin. 1718–1783. English critic of the Old Testament.
KESTNER, Johann Georg. 1741–1800. Charlotte Buff’s fiancé.
KLOPSTOCK, Friedrich Gottlieb. 1724–1803. German poet.
LAVATER, Johann Kaspar. 1741–1801. Swiss physiognomist.
LOTTE (Charlotte Buff). Kestner’s betrothed.
MERCK, Johann Heinrich. 1741–1791. Darmstadt. Writer.
MICHAELIS, Johann David. 1717–1791. Göttingham. German Bible critic.
NICOLAI, Christoph Friedrich. 1733–1811. Bookdealer and writer. Berlin.
PEGELOW, David. Russian surgeon from Riga.
SEMLER, Johann Salomo. 1725–1791. Halle. German Bible critic.
SULZER, Johann Georg. 1720–1779. Berlin. Philosopher.
SWIFT, Jonathan. 1667–1745. English satirist.
WEYGAND, Christian. Bookdealer and publisher in Leipzig.
WEYLAND, Friedrich Leopold. Goethe’s table companion and friend in Strassburg.
WINCKELMANN, Johann Joachim. 1717–1768. German archaeologist and historian of art.
WOOD, Robert. 1717–1771. Historian of art.
NOTES
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER
l Melusina, a water sprite.
2 Miss Jenny, the heroine of a popular novel at the time.
3 Allemande, a precursor of the waltz.
4 Klopstock’s ode, “Die Frühlingsfeier” (“The Rites of Spring”).
5 Ossian, an Irish hero of the third century. Here the reference is to books of prose poems purported to be translations from the Gaelic (1762–1763) by James Macpherson and later exposed as fraudulent.
6 Cruse of oil, I Kings 17: 11–16.
7 Fingal, in the Ossianic legend, king of Morven and father of Ossian.
8 In various previous translations of Werther, the translator resorted to the original English text by James Macpherson, which is so weird and awkward it could never plausibly have moved Lotte and Werther to their tragic breakdown. Goethe’s translation into German of the part called The Songs of Selma, here attributed to Werther, is such a vast improvement on the Macpherson version that I preferred to translate it—C.H.
9 Emilia Galotti, drama by Lessing.
REFLECTIONS ON WERTHER
1 The family of Friederike Brion. See “Goethe in Sesenheim.”
2 From Rousseau’s novel, The New Héloïse, also written in letter form.
3 In Book XII of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe tells of a “round table” where he and his friends had assembled and given each other the names of famous knights.
4 From an anonymous poem of the seventeenth century, A Satire on the Human Race.
5 Lodun, god of poetry according to Ossian.
6 From “Suicide,” a poem by Th. Wharton, 1771.
7 Marcus Salvius Otho, Roman emperor, A.D. 69.
8 Zeuxis, a Greek painter.
9 In Nathan the Wise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), German critic and dramatist, compared three religions with three rings that cannot be told apart—an original and two copies.
GOETHE IN SESENHEIM
1 Now included in Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Travels).
2 Inserted in Book II of Dichtung und Wahrheit, and subtitled “A Boy’s Fairy Tale,” it is actually an invention of Goethe’s maturer years (1811).
3 His theory was that he could tell the character of a man by the shape of his skull.
4 End of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book X. Book XI, published two years later, opens with the famous quotation “That the trees don’t grow up into heaven has been provided for,” and continues the Sesenheim idyll as follows here.
5 Goethe goes into Herder’s way of preaching and reading aloud (p. 137, “Goethe in Sesenheim”) in order to contrast it tacitly with his own way of communicating with a listening audience.
In a passage at the end of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book X (pp. 155 and 156 in this volume), Goethe discusses the extraordinary impact of the spoken word on an audience attuned to the speaker. Dwelling on this, he goes so far as to brand writing a misuse of human speech.
There is a curious discrepancy between the passage purporting to give the views of the maturer Goethe on this matter, and the return to the incident in question—his recital of “The New Melusina” at Sesenheim—in the opening pages of Book XI, published two years later. (This pause and passage of time is indicated by spacing on p. 156. See note 4.)
There he tells us that the active response of the audience was due to their matching of the two characters of that story with a real couple of their personal acquaintance. This explanation comes as an afterthought. Had he inserted his vehement remarks at the end of Book X as reflecting the mind of the young author at the time of the Sesenheim idyll, the unity of the mood would have been preserved. But coming forty years later as the reflections of the writer of the memoirs who had learned the true reason for the extraordinary effect his story had produced, they are out of place. Obviously, the Goethe who wrote the account at the end of Book X had not then planned to give it the peculiar twist that he adds later when he takes up the situation once more.
Why then did Goethe add this twist in returning to the matter of the effect of his story upon his audience? We find the answer in his elaborate reflections on the participation of the reading public in the case of Werther, as told in the following books of Dichtung und Wahrheit. What made the interest of the public so intense in that instance was not the pure empathy of sensitive readers with the fictitious hero and his fate. It was the fact, rather, that this hero and his fate showed a most striking resemblance to an actual man and his catastrophic fate fresh in the memory of the readers. This type of interest caused the author great annoyance. He wanted his Werther to appeal strictly on its own merits, as a compelling piece of creative fiction. Goethe uses the instance of Werther to dwell on the loneliness of the artist and to emphasize the gulf that separates him from the public that reads him (“Reflections on Werther,” p. 134).
In all this, of course, he ignores or minimizes the fact that in patterning the locale, the circumstances, the time, and the tragic end of Werther on the model of young Jerusalem, he had deliberately invited the type of curiosity that he complains about.—Hermann J. Weigand.
6 Goethe here refers to his dancing master’s daughter Lucinda, who fell in love with him while he was attracted to her sister, Emilie, a situation he uses in Werther’s first letter to William. In their last encounter, Lucinda kisses him passionately in front of Emilie and says, “Fear my curse! Misfortune upon misfortune shall be heaped forever on her who kisses your lips after me. Just try to approach him again…. I know that this time God has heard me.” Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book IX.
7 The bride of the fool in Goethe’s farce, The Fool’s Wedding.
8 “Willkommen und Abschied” (“Welcome and Farewell”). “Mailied” (“May Song”). “Mit einem gemalten Band” (“With a Painted Ribbon”). “Erwache Friederike” (“Awaken, Friederike”). “Balde sehe ich Riekchen wieder” (“Soon I Shall See Her Again”).
9 “Mit einem gemalten Band” (“With a Painted Ribbon”).
10 Gretchen (1764), Goethe’s first love at the age of fifteen, believed to be partly fictitious and a composite of several figures. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book V.
11 Annette (1766) followed Gretchen in Goethe’s affections, when he was a student in Leipzig. She was Anna Katharina Schönkopf, who inspired the only drama left of his youthful days, Die Laune des Verliebten (The Model of a Man in Love). Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book VII.
12 From Klopstock’s ode “Braga.”
13 From Klopstock’s ode “Skating.”
THE NEW MELUSINA
1 David R. Röntgen (1745–1807) was a fine cabinetmaker in Neuwied, whom Goethe probably met on his Rhine journey with Lavater.
AFTERWORD
From its initial publication, The Sorrows of Young Werther has continually provoked intense responses. While some readers identify readily with Goethe’s beset protagonist, others respond with puzzled disappointment or impatience. Those who embrace the book often do so in rapturous terms. The writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, for example, a proponent of the Storm-and-Stress movement, spoke of the holy Werther, while the philosopher-physician Johann Georg Zimmermann, himself the author of a text on Solitude, professed in a letter from January 19, 1775, that Goethe’s novel had “so hit all strings of my soul and set them swinging that I had to rest for fourteen days.”* But Werther has also had its share of detractors. For Goethe’s contemporaries, such disapproval rested on moral grounds, while readers today sometimes grow impatient with the excessive sentimentality of the novel. Thus, the literary critic Claudia Brodsky suggests facetiously that “the question from the outset is not why Werther dies…but why it takes him so long to die…one can well imagine Lotte’s sense that the announced departure is indeed ‘auf ewig’ which is to say, not ‘for ever’ but ‘forever in coming.”†
This bifurcation of reader responses is not surprising. Written by the young Goethe in 1774 and revised by the mature author for republication in 1787, the text bears the traces of different stages of life. It is marked by an ambiguity that resists all attempts to streamline its message. Goethe was acutely aware of the accusations leveled against his youthful fiction, including the charge of inciting copycat suicides. In a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann in January of 1824, Goethe called his book “incendiary rockets” and claimed that it left him with an uncanny feeling.* Consequently, Goethe undertook revisions to distance readers from Werther through irony and metafictional comments. To begin with, there is the rather heavy-handed epigraph added to the second edition of 1775 (but omitted again in the later edition): “be a man and don’t follow me.” In addition, Goethe introduced subplots, which, as he explained in Conversations of German Refugees (1795), are ideally suited to shed light on the main story: “I love parallel stories very much. One points to the other and explains its meaning better than many dry words.”†
The subplots that Goethe introduced to the novel resemble Werther’s story but envision alternate developments and underline the pathological and criminal potential inherent in Werther’s unbridled passion. For example, Werther’s fate bears some similarity to that of the peasant lad who is in love with his mistress, a widow who does not reciprocate his feelings. Here, excessive passion leads to violence. Unable to bear that his beloved shows affection for another, the peasant lad murders his rival. Werther’s overidentification with the unfortunate farmhand is evident in his ill-fated attempt to secure his release from justice. There is also the story of the former secretary of Lotte’s father, who, like Werther, is in love with Lotte. When his love remains unrequited, he is reduced to a raving maniac and is kept chained in the madhouse (page 79). Finally, there is the story of a girl who drowns herself in the river when she is jilted by her lover. In all three cases, unrequited passion is associated with madness and death.
Goethe not only added subplots—he also portrayed Albert more positively, perhaps responding to the complaints of the character’s real-life model, Johann Christian Kestner, who felt that Goethe had turned him into a miserable creature. Conversely, Goethe’s revision casts an ironic light on Werther. Werther’s literary ambitions are laid open to ridicule as the self-styled scholar now reads of Homer’s heroic battles while munching on decidedly nonheroic sugar peas. Finally, the attempt to deter prospective imitators is particularly pronounced in the ending, which contrasts Werther’s vision of a noble, self-sacrificing death with his gruesome and bloody twelve-hour ordeal: “all his limbs were paralyzed. He had shot himself in the head above the right eye, driving his brains out…. His breathing was terrible” (page 109). Moreover, Goethe’s desire to highlight the problematic aspects of his character does not end with Werther’s death. In his Letters from Switzerland (1779), which purports to be a prequel to Werther, Goethe further defames his protagonist’s character by portraying Werther’s ill-advised visit to a prostitute, all in the service of furthering his artistic education.
The intense response to Goethe’s text—and Goethe’s attempts to steer the reception of his novel in a different direction—has much to do with the fact that Werther was published during a period in which the German book market experienced a radical transformation. In the late eighteenth century, there was a revolution in reading. Literacy rates increased drastically, from roughly 10 percent to 50 percent. More and more contemporaries joined literary societies, salons, and reading circles. This increase in literacy changed reading habits. After 1740, the percentage of publications devoted to religious topics decreased dramatically, whereas interest in fiction was on the rise. The focus on different subject matters went hand in hand with a transition from intensive to extensive readings habits. In previous centuries, reading implied a rereading over and over again of the same text, the Bible, with the intent of finding models for one’s own behavior. In the course of the eighteenth-century reading revolution, the attachment to one text was replaced by a craving for variety, satisfied by the growing production of novels—though we should bear in mind that phrases such as “the explosion of the book market” tend to obscure the fact that, in relative terms, the number of what we would call active readers remained small and the number of those interested in works by Goethe and Schiller rather than contemporary hacks even smaller.
The reception of Werther was affected by these changes in the book market. Readers who were trained to look for moral precepts and behavioral models imitated Werther because they were accustomed to peruse a book for its didactic potential. In Truth and Poetry, Goethe speaks of “the old prejudice which the dignity of the printed word arouses—it should have a didactic purpose. But true representation has none” (page 131). Because readers were trained to deduce practical moral applications, they felt called upon to translate fiction into reality. Goethe laments that while he felt relieved and enlightened because he had turned reality into poetry, “my friends were confusing themselves by believing that they had to turn poetry into reality” (page 129). Tellingly, some contemporary critics showed their investment in the didactic purpose of literature by showering advice on Goethe’s protagonist. Thus, the poet Matthias Claudius expresses his conviction that Werther could have been
freed from his destructive passion had he sought distraction in travel to Paris or Peking, and Friedrich Nicolai’s Joys of Young Werther (1775) resolves the matter through a simple gimmick: Albert averts tragedy by loading his gun with chicken blood.
The reading revolution is evident not only in the reception of Werther but leaves traces in the book itself. It is only fitting that Werther himself is an enthusiastic reader who befriends books and models his behavior after literary characters. Even his feelings appear to be mediated by and reflected in texts. Werther favors Homer in the beginning of the novel, while he still has his senses, and James Macpherson’s Ossian—a national epic in Gaelic that created quite a stir in Germany’s literary circles and that Goethe had translated—when he is going mad. Throughout, Werther’s changing literary interests are made to signify a transition from a world of patriarchal order to one of anarchic tumultuousness. Similarly, the developing relationship between Werther and Lotte is reflected in their literary preferences. At times, it appears as though Werther’s desire itself originates in literary models. Werther loves by the book: his passion for Lotte erupts most violently when the lovers immerse themselves in Klopstock and reaches its erotic climax as they read Ossian. Conversely, Werther’s obsession with the Songs of Selma, the story of a woman torn between two men, and Lotte’s lack of interest in this text, which she stores in a drawer and never gets around to reading, signals the distance between them. Last but not least, Werther is an avid reader of his own letters—“On rereading this page, I see that I have forgotten to tell you the end of the story” (page 69), he proclaims as he peruses his own text—a proclivity that underlines his tendency toward excessive introspection and self-observation.