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The Sorrows of Young Werther

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The Sorrows of Young Werther ([ˈveːɐ̯tɐ]; German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), or simply Werther, is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.

The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life and involved triangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Charlotte Buff, and Christian Kestner. The other involved Goethe, Maximiliane von La Roche, and Peter Anton Brentano (who married Maximiliane in January, 1774). Goethe spent the summer of 1772 in Wetzlar, where he quickly fell in love with Charlotte, who was already engaged to Christian Kestner. Goethe pulled away from her after a few months. Almost immediately, he fell in love with Maximiliane, who was only 16 years old and above him in social station, thus setting the scene for another unrequited love affair. Meanwhile an acquaintance of Goethe and his friends in Wetzlar, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, was suffering from a similar impossible love, in his case with a countess who was engaged already. Jerusalem, 25 years old, was a lawyer and minor philosopher. On the night of 29 or 30 October 1772, he used a pistol borrowed from Kestner to shoot himself in the head. These events are fictionalized to describe the emotional tumult of the titular character Werther, who kills himself in despair after he falls in love with a woman engaged to another man.

The novel was adapted as the opera Werther by Jules Massenet in 1892.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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And this is the Goethe to whom our cultured Philistines point as the happiest of Germans, that they may prove their thesis, that it must be possible to be happy among them--with the unexpressed corollary that no one can be pardoned for feeling unhappy and lonely among them. Hence they push their doctrine, in practice, to its merciless conclusion, that there is always a secret guilt in isolation. Poor Schopenhauer…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season, Part II
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At one moment she felt anxious that the servant should remain in the adjoining room, then she changed her mind. Werther, meanwhile, walked impatiently up and down. She went to the piano, and determined not to retire. She then collected her thoughts, and sat down quietly at Werther's side, who had taken his usual place on the sofa. "Have you brought nothing to read?" she inquired. He had nothing. "There in my…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
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Although Count Ernst put on the rugged aspect of a man, Nature maintained her rights in him, and he could not hide his strong feelings of tenderness, when at parting he quitted the embraces of his weeping spouse. As in dumb sorrow he was leaving her, she turned hastily to the cradle of her children; plucked out of it her sleeping boy; pressed it softly to her breast, and held it with tearful eyes to the father, to…
Thomas Carlyle, Translations from the German
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The Sorrows of Young Werther

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