Thinking Too Much: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, whose heyday in the English language was in the 19^th century, thanks to the efforts of men and women like George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, is a writer whose greatness we hear about more often than we actually sit down and read him. He was an indisputably superhuman being: writer of plays, poetry, prose, a statesman, a scientist, a man who saw battle in the Napoleonic Wars – Goethe seemed to have the experience and the talents and the range of a hundred others. He even, unlike his contemporaries, Schiller and Hölderlin, managed to live the entirety of his life without dying prematurely or going mad – no small feat for someone whose dates might make us term him “Romantic”. But still, we don’t read him. We know his main works – Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and of course Werther, and perhaps a smattering of his poetry – but only second-hand.

I don’t know why that is. The common explanation is that Goethe ultimately came to embody a distant, lofty, Enlightenment-era sensibility that makes him boring to the modern reader, growing up in the shadow of emotional, irrational, Romanticism. Perhaps there are simply a dearth of good translations? In my time at Cambridge I have read precisely two works by Goethe – Urfaust, an early version of Faust: Part 1, and Iphigenia, a play. Yet for the German tradition he is as central as Shakespeare is in our own. And so I went and bought myself a 14-volume collected edition of his works, and hope to read at least some of them, over the coming year(s). Being interested in canonical European literature and not knowing Goethe is rather embarrassing, after all. And if he is really a genius, I am sure he will have something interesting to say to me.

It’s just a shame he doesn’t in Werther!

The Sorrows of Young Werther

With the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe became an international sensation. But often what is initially popular doesn’t stand the test of time. Werther is perhaps more notorious now than anything else, on account of the various copycat suicides it inspired. I have to say, for me, a 21^st century sad person, I find it strange how this book could have brought anyone to end their life. The gulf of sensibilities seems huge here. This story is not a semi-respectable literary love-triangle so much as one idiot’s selfish, solipsistic, obsession for another human being which brings torment to her and destruction to him. But, as always with German, it could just be that my understanding of the text was negatively impacted by my knowledge of the language. Anyway, Werther is important, so I suppose I must try to find what’s good and interesting in it. Let’s see.

Werther

Werther is structured predominantly as a series of letters from young Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Later on, the novel also includes a few letters to Lotte (the heroine), some of Werther’s translation work, and some third person narration. All of these formal elements are perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel, and I’ll write about them towards the end of this post.

The initial impression Werther’s letters make is that of an overwhelming emotional consciousness. Werther is emotional about absolutely everything. Even a decision like trying to live in the present is fraught with feelings: “I want to enjoy the present, and what has past should stay there in the past”. One of the central ideas of Werther is stated early on in a lamentation from Werther – “oh best of friends, what is the human heart!” The answer to the question, at least the one the book offers, is profoundly limited – we can’t really know the human heart. Werther’s letters, emotional, increasingly deranged, are only ever his letters. We are drawn into a world of pure subjectivity, so that it’s impossible to have any confidence about what is actually going on outside Werther’s head.

But we should have a go. Werther has ended up in a small village, there to do absolutely nothing. I believe the reason for his exile involves a romantic entanglement with Wilhelm’s sister, but I can’t be sure because the whole thing takes up a single page and is promptly forgotten. Here, in the peace and quiet, he makes friends with the locals, and eventually comes across a young lady, Charlotte – or Lotte, to her intimates. Lotte is, in Werther’s eyes, so absolutely amazing that to call her an angel is not enough. She is perfect, not just in her beauty, but in embodying a kind of idealised feminine existence: her mother is dead, so she looks after her younger siblings in her place. How amazing, how wonderful! Did I mention that she is engaged? Well… yes… but “I received the news somewhat indifferently”. Lotte reads, Lotte is natural and “artless”, a pure being plucked from Rousseau dreams.

Lotte

Yes, Werther is head-over-heels in love. What passion! But is it really passion, given that “often I didn’t even hear the words she spoke to me”. Werther’s imagination is so great, so hard-working, that it envelopes poor Lotte. They do have their moments, like when they are heading home after a storm and it’s all very spooky and intense. Memorably, she utters the name “Klopstock”, a well-known German poet of the day, while looking at the sky. Wilhelm, wisely, picks up on what Werther himself doesn’t, and suggests he leave before it’s too late. Werther, of course, does not. And at this point we have the first of his letters to Lotte: ridiculous, emotional, and dangerous too. Her husband-to-be has been away so far, but what will come of it when he returns?

“Wilhelm, is it just a phantom speaking, when we think all’s well?” Werther switches with alarming regularity from the deepest of joys to the deepest of sadnesses. “We long, ah, long to give our entire being over to something, and be filled with the bliss of a single, great, and powerful feeling”. He is an artist, who naturally barely gets anything done. He manages three incomplete portraits of Lotte. At one point he blames the peace and quiet of the rural idyll for his failure to work, but once he has tempestuous feelings he doesn’t become that much more successful either.

We hear Lotte rarely, at least while the narrative still consists of Werther’s letters. The effect of this is suffocating. We struggle to see her beneath Werther’s description of her, which is always filled with the possibility that he is deceiving himself (“Yes, I feel, and in this I am sure I can trust my heart… that she loves me!”).

Albert

In the first edition of Werther, published in 1774, Lotte’s fiancé Albert is a less sympathetic character than he appears in the revised version of Werther from 1787 which most people read these days. The thirteen years clearly gave Goethe time to mellow and let him turn upon his hero more than his youth once allowed. Albert is in many ways Werther’s opposite. Where Werther is emotional and prone to extremes, Albert is dour and serious and practical. Unlike Werther, who doesn’t appear to do any work at all, Albert’s main characteristic is his “Emsigkeit”, or industriousness. When the topic of passion comes up, Albert’s views are predictably sensible: “a man who lets his passions throw him about loses all his self-control and appears as a drunk or else as a madman”. For Werther, the Romantic, this is sacrilege. But Werther loves Lotte, so he keeps visiting their house.

The thought has just come to me that Werther and Theodor Storm’s Immensee have a lot in common. Both feature a love triangle where the emotional man loses out to the industrious man in the pursuit of the somewhat emotional girl. But the key difference is that Reinhard, the hero of Immensee, fails to propose to Elisabeth on time because of his sensibilities (he wants the proposal to be something special), while Werther arrives too late to make a proposal at all. Immensee is the tragic story of how emotions and hesitancy spoil a beautiful romance; Werther is the story of how a refusal to think rationally lets Werther imagine into being a romance where he has no right to, leaving him a far less sympathetic protagonist.

In the comparison between Albert and Werther we have played out what is one of the fundamental dramas of the 19^th century – namely that of feeling against reason. In an increasingly industrial, increasingly business-driven world, feeling becomes a liability while hard-work and cool intelligence assume a dominant position in bourgeois society. In Werther, Lotte may regret that she is not with Werther, but she does not leave Albert, and Werther takes his own life. His sensibility dies with him, while Albert and Lotte will no doubt have plenty of little industrious children of their own. But perhaps all this is eminently sensible – only through the marriage of reason with feeling can feeling hope to survive. Werther, who wouldn’t know reason if it hit him over the head, just isn’t right for this world.  

Style and Structure

Werther’s second half, which details Werther’s precipitous decline into the abyss, is more interesting than the first, which had ended with him at last managing to leave Lotte’s village and do something else for a month. It is here that Goethe starts playing around with form. As long as we inhabit Werther’s insane letters, we are forced to accept his worldview: “What else is human fate but to go beyond its bounds, to drink the cup right to the dregs?”

But at about three quarters of the way through the book the letters stop and we have a message from the publisher, which comes as something of a shock. After the closed world of Werther’s letters, suddenly we have a sense of objectivity. It gives the reader the necessary perspective to realise that Werther really is going mad, just in case they hadn’t realise this earlier. We continue reading letters from Werther, but now they are broken up with information about how they were received, or what Werther was doing. We hear Lotte’s voice, her fear that perhaps “it is only because you couldn’t possess me that your desire gained so much power over you.” What a sensible thought. It is too bad that Werther is unwilling to listen to her.

The third person narration naturally allows us to hear about Werther’s suicide, as being dead makes it hard to write a letter (though of course there are plenty of literary workarounds). I think that the main effect of this narrative rupture is to ironize what had otherwise been deadly serious – Werther’s love. As the publisher goes through the letters left on Werther’s desk, including at least two letters that purport to be the last one’s he’ll ever send to Lotte, it’s hard not to feel that Werther is much less the emotional hero of the novel, and more a fool who came and destroyed the peace and happiness of others. His translation of part of the Ossian poems, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, is beautiful, but at the same time hints at the unoriginality of his own feelings. Is Werther just imitating others, even at his most emotional?

Conclusion

I have written before about how writing a blog post makes me appreciate works of literature in ways I would not have otherwise and find enjoyment in works that otherwise frustrated me. But I am not sure that this is one of those times. Werther is too imbalanced – too much feeling, not enough reason. For the modern sensibility, Werther’s failings are too much his own. There are plenty of things to be sad about in life, in love as in everything else, without letting our imaginations create additional difficulties for us.

Werther was my first prose experience of the almighty Goethe, but it is a young man’s work, and I am glad I have finished it and can move on to something else. I am certain that better things await, if not in volume 6, then in one of the others! So, dear reader, know that the battle with Goethe has only just begun.

Readers, should you have read more Goethe to me and had a better experience, or indeed had a better experience with Werther, do let me know in the comments.