The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings

Afterword by Elisabeth Krimmer
Translated by Catherine Hutter
The Sorrows of Young Werther brings to life an idyllic German village where a youth on vacation meets and falls for lovely Charlotte. The tragedy unfolds in the letters Werther writes to his friend about Charlotte’s charms, even after he realizes his love will remain unrequited. “Reflections on Werther” and “Goethe in Sesenheim,” collections of excerpts from the author’s own memoirs, reveal the genius who, as Nietzsche said, “disciplined himself into wholeness.” Next is “The New Melusina,”the delightful story of a pixie princess who assumes the form of a woman as she searches for a human mate. Finally, “The Fairy Tale” is a sophisticated but strange story in which the laws of nature and physics do not apply—mingled among its human characters is a cast of two sentient will-o’-the-wisps, a giant and his shadow, a talking green serpent, and four metal statues.

With an Introduction by Marcelle Clements

and a New Afterword

“Nature has endowed [Goethe] more generously than anyone since Shakespeare.”—Friedrich Schiller
“[In] Werther, all the richness of [Goethe’s] gift was apparent….The extreme, nerve-shattering sensitivity of the little book…evoked a storm of applause which went beyond all bounds and fairly intoxicated the world.”—Thomas Mann
Before he was thirty, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had proven himself a master of the novel, drama, and lyric poetry. But even more impressive than his versatility was his unwillingness ever to settle into a single style or approach; whenever he used a literary form, he made it something new. Born in 1749 to a well-to-do family in Frankfurt, he was sent to Strasbourg to earn a law degree. There, he met the poet-philosopher Herder, discovered Shakespeare, and began to write poetry. His play Götz von Berlichingen (1773) made him famous throughout Germany. He was invited to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, where he quickly became a cabinet minister. In 1774 his novel of Romantic melancholy, The Sorrows of a Young Werther, electrified all of Europe. Soon he was at work on the first version of his Faust, which would finally appear as a fragment in 1790. In the 1780s, Goethe visited England and immersed himself in classical poetry. The next decade saw the appearance of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, his novel of a young artist's education, and a wealth of poetry and criticism. He returned to the Faust material around the turn of the century and completed Part 1 in 1808. The later years of his life were devoted to a bewildering array of pursuits: research in botany and a theory of colors, a novel (Elective Affinities), the evocative poems of the West-Eastern Divan, and his great autobiography, Poetry and Truth. In his eighties he prepared a forty-volume edition of his works; the forty-first volume, published after his death in 1832, was the second part of Faust. Goethe’s wide-ranging mind could never be confined to one form or one philosophy. When asked for the theme of his masterwork, Faust, he could only say, “From heaven through all the world to hell”; his subject was nothing smaller. View titles by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

About

The Sorrows of Young Werther brings to life an idyllic German village where a youth on vacation meets and falls for lovely Charlotte. The tragedy unfolds in the letters Werther writes to his friend about Charlotte’s charms, even after he realizes his love will remain unrequited. “Reflections on Werther” and “Goethe in Sesenheim,” collections of excerpts from the author’s own memoirs, reveal the genius who, as Nietzsche said, “disciplined himself into wholeness.” Next is “The New Melusina,”the delightful story of a pixie princess who assumes the form of a woman as she searches for a human mate. Finally, “The Fairy Tale” is a sophisticated but strange story in which the laws of nature and physics do not apply—mingled among its human characters is a cast of two sentient will-o’-the-wisps, a giant and his shadow, a talking green serpent, and four metal statues.

With an Introduction by Marcelle Clements

and a New Afterword

Reviews

“Nature has endowed [Goethe] more generously than anyone since Shakespeare.”—Friedrich Schiller
“[In] Werther, all the richness of [Goethe’s] gift was apparent….The extreme, nerve-shattering sensitivity of the little book…evoked a storm of applause which went beyond all bounds and fairly intoxicated the world.”—Thomas Mann

Author

Before he was thirty, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had proven himself a master of the novel, drama, and lyric poetry. But even more impressive than his versatility was his unwillingness ever to settle into a single style or approach; whenever he used a literary form, he made it something new. Born in 1749 to a well-to-do family in Frankfurt, he was sent to Strasbourg to earn a law degree. There, he met the poet-philosopher Herder, discovered Shakespeare, and began to write poetry. His play Götz von Berlichingen (1773) made him famous throughout Germany. He was invited to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, where he quickly became a cabinet minister. In 1774 his novel of Romantic melancholy, The Sorrows of a Young Werther, electrified all of Europe. Soon he was at work on the first version of his Faust, which would finally appear as a fragment in 1790. In the 1780s, Goethe visited England and immersed himself in classical poetry. The next decade saw the appearance of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, his novel of a young artist's education, and a wealth of poetry and criticism. He returned to the Faust material around the turn of the century and completed Part 1 in 1808. The later years of his life were devoted to a bewildering array of pursuits: research in botany and a theory of colors, a novel (Elective Affinities), the evocative poems of the West-Eastern Divan, and his great autobiography, Poetry and Truth. In his eighties he prepared a forty-volume edition of his works; the forty-first volume, published after his death in 1832, was the second part of Faust. Goethe’s wide-ranging mind could never be confined to one form or one philosophy. When asked for the theme of his masterwork, Faust, he could only say, “From heaven through all the world to hell”; his subject was nothing smaller. View titles by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe