“All learned schoolmasters and tutors are agreed that little children do not know what they want, but no one likes to admit that grown men stumble across this earth like children, not knowing whence they came nor whither they are going, and that a grown man can be just as poor at pursuing the higher aims of life and can be ruled, just like a child, by cookies, cake, and rod.”

Sturm und Drang was a literary movement in Germany, which was anti-Enlightenment, featured strong expression of emotions, emphasized the importance of individual subjectivity, and  privileged inspiration over reason. Goethe’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, typifies this movement. We learn about the novel’s events through the highly subjective and capricious letters of the eponymous, young Romantic Werther. The epistolary style provides the perfect vehicles for individual subjectivity so important to this movement’s style and Werther’s extreme fluctuations of emotion.

Werther is an emotional young man who moves to Walhiem due to his Romantic ideas about the country and peasantry. At first, he finds his Romantic ideals fulfilled by his interactions with the peasantry, spending days reading Homer’s The Odyssey while taking in the views of nature, until he encounters Lotte, a woman who shares passions for the same books and many of his Romantic sympathies, and then his whole world is turned upside down; she is inconveniently engaged to another man. Werther befriends her and her fiance. He continues his unhealthy friendship, despite pining away in secret for her, even after Lotte marries her fiance, Albert. To take his mind off her temporarily, Werther takes a side journey to work under an ambassador, hoping to enter diplomatic service. He finds these experiences, interacting with the nobility and the ambassadors stifling–a conservative bunch antithetical to everything his Romantic ideals and emotional constitution represent. Like an early Holden Caufield, he can’t stand all the phonies kissing butt just to get ahead. Unable to stand the sycophantic life in the diplomatic service anymore, Werther returns back to Walhiem and returns to visiting the now married Lotte. Her husband, Albert once friendly feelings toward Werther significantly cools.  Lotte on her own initiative decides Werther shouldn’t visit her so frequently anymore. However, upon missing Werther, she comes to realize that Werther is her soulmate, that he matches her temperament and fulfills her deeper intellectual needs the best, while Albert more temperate nature and fortunes that allow her comfort fulfills her practical needs the best, leaving her in a state of confusion about her own life and happiness. Werther getting further lost in his sorrow for Lotte each day borrows Albert’s gun and commits suicide.

Albert, on the one hand, represent comfort, money, and an even-tempered man. Goethe could easily have portrayed him as a greedy spoiled capitalist to act the foil to Werther, but instead Albert is a sympathetic man who is so trusting that he doesn’t mind his wife spending time with another man who is obviously in love with her. Werther represents his opposite, wildly emotional, a man in love with books, and the beauty in the world. Lotte realizes there are qualities about both men that she admires. These two polar opposites, with Lotte in the middle, are important because it’s not exactly clear whose side we’re supposed to be on.

For a book that in theory celebrates emotion, the conclusion of the novel is downright disturbing. Romantic ideals seem pleasant in the beginning when it’s lounging about on a nice day reading Homer outside among the beautiful scenery of nature, but then the extreme emotions that are also part of this German version of Romanticism lead the protagonist  blow out his brains. Given this conclusion, it’s hard for me to see this novel as a rallying cry for Romantic ideals.

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