Question 1

Did Werther really cause copycat suicides?

Accepted Answer

There are documented reports of young men across Europe who dressed like Werther (in the blue coat and yellow waistcoat that Goethe gives him) and shot themselves, sometimes with the novel open beside them, in the years after the novel's publication. Whether the novel caused these deaths or whether they were people who would have died anyway and who happened to read the novel is impossible to determine — the 'Werther effect' as a documented sociological phenomenon (where publicizing a suicide increases suicide rates) was named from these cases and has been shown to operate in other contexts (celebrity suicides, newspaper coverage of suicides), but the causal mechanism in the 1770s is not provable. The novel was banned in several jurisdictions in response to the reports.

Question 2

What is Goethe's relationship to Werther?

Accepted Answer

Goethe wrote Werther at twenty-four after his own painful and unresolved passion for Charlotte Buff, who was engaged to another man. He always maintained that writing the novel was a form of therapy — that he put his own suffering into Werther and thereby cured himself of it. In later life he expressed discomfort with the novel's continued association with his name, preferring to be known for Faust, and at times seemed embarrassed by the young man's extreme emotional indulgence. But the novel remained in circulation throughout his life as his most widely read work, and his complicated relationship to it reflects the contradiction between the young romantic he was and the classicist he became.

Question 3

Is Werther a sympathetic character?

Accepted Answer

Werther is a character designed to produce extreme responses — Goethe's first readers largely identified with him completely, but readers from a later period (including Goethe himself in his maturity) have been more ambivalent about his self-centeredness, his refusal to accept limits, and his treatment of Lotte and her husband Albert as pieces in a drama organized around his own feelings. The novel's moral position is deliberately unclear — the editor who provides the novel's framing narrative (the fictional editor who has assembled Werther's letters) mourns Werther, but the events of the novel also show Werther being impossible, self-indulgent, and in some respects cruel to the people around him.

Question 4

What should I read after The Sorrows of Young Werther?

Accepted Answer

Goethe's Faust (Part One, 1808; Part Two, 1832) is the natural successor — a longer, more complex meditation on the same questions about desire, limits, and the romantic temperament that Werther raises. Within the German tradition, Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion are the Romantic successors to Werther's program. For the broader European tradition, Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830) is the most important successor — Julien Sorel's passionate self-assertion in a world organized against it is the French development of what Werther begins.

The Sorrows of Young Werther Reading Order

Complete Young Werther Book List