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The Sorrows of Young 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-March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.
The Sorrows of Young Werther turned Goethe, previously an unknown author, into a literary celebrity almost overnight. Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature, having written a Goethe-inspired soliloquy in his youth and carried Werther with him on his campaigning to Egypt. It also started the phenomenon known as Werther Fever, which caused young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel. Items of merchandising such as prints, decorated Meissen porcelain and even a perfume were produced.
The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide. The men were often dressed in the same clothing as Goethe’s description of Werther and using similar pistols. Often the book was found at the scene of the suicide. Rudiger Safranski, a modern biographer of Goethe, dismisses the Werther Effect as only a persistent rumor. Nonetheless, this aspect of Werther Fever was watched with concern by the authorities - both the novel and the Werther clothing style were banned in Leipzig in 1775; the novel was also banned in Denmark and Italy. It was also watched with fascination by fellow authors. One of these, Friedrich Nicolai, decided to create a satirical piece with a happy ending, entitled Die Freuden des jungen Werthers ( The Joys of Young Werther ), in which Albert, having realized what Werther is up to, loaded chicken’s blood into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther’s suicide, and happily concedes Charlotte to him. After some initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen.
Goethe, however, was not pleased with the Freuden and started a literary war with Nicolai that lasted all his life, writing a poem titled Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe ( Nicolai on Werther’s grave ), in which Nicolai (here a passing nameless pedestrian) defecates on Werther’s grave, so desecrating the memory of a Werther from which Goethe had distanced himself in the meantime, as he had from the Sturm und Drang. This argument was continued in his collection of short and critical poems, the Xenien, and his play Faust. (wikipedia.org)
