Die Leiden des jungen Werther Add a review

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 1472 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 philospoher. On the night of Oct 29 or 30, 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.