Episode 370: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' by Goethe

Summary

Summary of The Great Books Podcast Episode 370: "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Goethe

Host: John J. Miller
Guest: Peter Milender, Dean of Religion, Humanities and Global Studies, Professor of Political Science at Houghton University

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Introduction

In Episode 370 of The Great Books Podcast, hosted by John J. Miller of National Review, scholar Peter Milender delves into Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's seminal work, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Recorded live from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan, the discussion explores the novel's literary craftsmanship, its place in early Romanticism, and its enduring cultural significance.

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Why The Sorrows of Young Werther is a Great Book

Peter Milender highlights multiple facets that confer greatness upon Goethe's novel. While acknowledging its literary artistry and status as a paragon of early Romanticism, Milender emphasizes the novel's exploration of enduring cultural tensions. He articulates:

“There’s this really finely tuned, finely wrought tension between, on the one hand, Goethe wanting us to recognize the value of the perspective that Werther brings to life and also have a kind of critical distance from it.”
— Peter Milender [37:04]

This duality captures the protagonist's romantic yearning for authenticity and interconnectedness with nature against the persistent challenges in human relationships.

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Overview of the Novel’s Form and Story

The Sorrows of Young Werther employs an epistolary format, consisting solely of letters penned by Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Milender explains the significance of this choice:

“The novel consists of these letters up until the very end. … it almost creates a kind of claustrophobic feeling for the reader, because you’re trapped inside his head as well.”
— Peter Milender [07:36]

Werther, a passionate young painter, travels to resolve his family's inheritance disputes while seeking personal rejuvenation. His journey leads him to Charlotte (Lotte), a young woman already engaged to Albert. Their deep emotional connection, despite Lotte's commitment, sets the stage for the novel's tragic trajectory.

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Character Analysis: Werther, Lotte, and Albert

Werther: Portrayed as the quintessential Romantic hero, Werther embodies intense emotion and a longing for wholeness. Milender notes his struggle to navigate societal conventions in pursuit of authenticity:

“Werther, who is this romantic person of emotion and passion and feeling and the heart, and Albert, who’s a little more of the sensible kind of bourgeois, rational one.”
— Peter Milender [12:00]

Lotte: Lotte represents domestic harmony and moral steadfastness. Despite her apparent attraction to Werther, she remains loyal to Albert, highlighting the novel's exploration of duty versus passion.

Albert: Serving as a foil to Werther, Albert epitomizes rationality, stability, and societal conformity. His character underscores the novel’s tension between Romantic idealism and bourgeois sensibility.

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Themes: Unrequited Love, Suicide, and Romanticism

Unrequited Love: Werther's profound yet unattainable love for Lotte drives the narrative. Both characters experience mutual attraction, complicating Werther's emotional turmoil.

Suicide: The novel culminates in Werther's deliberate suicide, a subject of intense controversy. Milender discusses the nuanced portrayal:

“It's very hard to read that and think, oh, that sounds like a pleasant way to go. I think Goethe is encouraging me to do that.”
— Peter Milender [27:18]

While Werther rationalizes his suicide as a means to escape insurmountable despair, Goethe also depicts the grim reality of the act, suggesting a critical stance rather than endorsement.

Romanticism: Aligning with early Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and individualism, Werther embodies the movement's ideals. Milender situates the novel within the "Sturm und Drang" period, contrasting it with later Romanticism's reaction against industrialization.

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Reception and Impact of the Novel

Upon its 1774 release, Werther became an immediate sensation, catapulting Goethe to European literary stardom. Milender cites numerous instances of the novel’s widespread influence:

“There was a kind of a fad for people to dress up like Werther. … Napoleon had read it. ... he was a big fan.”
— Peter Milender [23:28]

The novel's popularity was such that it reportedly inspired imitative suicides, reflecting its profound emotional resonance and controversial themes.

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Goethe’s Legacy in Literature

Peter Milender underscores Goethe's towering status in German literature, attributing much of his acclaim to Werther. Goethe's prolific career spanned various genres, including poetry, drama, scientific treatises, and political engagement. Notably, his magnum opus, Faust, further cemented his legacy as a central figure in European literary tradition.

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Relevance Today

Milender draws parallels between Werther and contemporary digital culture, likening Werther's personal letters to modern social media narratives:

“You imagine yourself into that person’s shoes, but at the same time you almost inevitably kind of ask yourself, is it real?”
— Peter Milender [37:04]

The novel's exploration of authentic self-presentation versus underlying emotional struggles remains pertinent, resonating with today's audiences grappling with the complexities of digital identity and interpersonal connections.

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Conclusion

The Sorrows of Young Werther endures as a literary masterpiece due to its intricate portrayal of emotional depth, its reflection of societal tensions, and its influence on both contemporaneous and modern audiences. Peter Milender's insightful analysis on The Great Books Podcast illuminates the novel's multifaceted significance, affirming its place within the Western literary canon.

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Notable Quotes:

“...you are able to see their own lives in today.”
— Peter Milender [37:04]

“Werther has some trouble dealing with the world in general. … a real social obstacle.”
— Peter Milender [06:37]

“The novel consists of these letters up until the very end.”
— Peter Milender [07:36]

“I think Goethe is encouraging me to do that.”
— Peter Milender [27:18]

Transcript

[Peter Milender]

Foreign.

[John J. Miller]

Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about the Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Peter Milender, dean of Religion, Humanities and Global Studies, as well as a professor of political science at Houghton University in New York. He's written for National Review, he co edits the Journal of Austrian Studies, and his substack is called From My Bookshelf. His podcast was previously on the Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, and he joins us by zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Peter, welcome back to the Great Books Podcast.

[Peter Milender]

Thanks, John. It's good to be back talking to you again.

[John J. Miller]

Why is the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe a great book?

[Peter Milender]

Well, there are a lot of reasons you could give for that. You could talk about its literary craftsmanship because it has a really interesting and, I think, arresting form. We could talk about how it's one of the great examples of early Romanticism. But let me suggest a different kind of reason for why I think it's a great book and a really interesting book. And that's the kind of tension that it maintains between two attitudes or two stances that I think are still very, very much with us in the culture today. So on the one hand, we. We get a look at the title character, the main figure, Werther, and he is this romantic, representative type. He is in tune with nature. He emphasizes his feelings and his passions. He wants to be at one with the world around him. He wants to be authentic and sincere and achieve a kind of wholeness. Might say he wants to be true to himself. We think of Sinatra singing I'm gonna do it my way right, or I gotta be me. These ideals that we still very much have with us. And so he stands for all of. And Goethe wants us to sympathize with that to a certain extent and to see that. But at the same time, the book also shows us the great difficulty in connecting with other human beings. So if Werthe wants to have this unity and wholeness and sense of being one with everyone and everything around him, the book is always reminding us of the many things that get in the way of that. For me, one of the really telling lines is a comment in the first half where Werther writes in one of his letters, here on Earth, no one easily understands anyone else. And so the tension that Goethe maintains, in a really striking fashion between this longing for connection and wholeness and authenticity. And then, on the other hand, the difficulty in really connecting with people, even understanding what really makes them tick, I think drives this book in a way that still grips the reader. Today.

[John J. Miller]

We're going to talk about all that. The story and the characters, its themes, what it says about unrequited love, what it says about suicide. Spoiler alert, there's a big suicide in the book, its fame, the legacy of its author, and a lot more. The book opens, Peter, with a letter from Werther. I keep wanting to say Werther, W E R, T H E R, because I speak American, but in German, of course, it's Werther, and I'm going to try and use that pronunciation here. At any rate, Peter, the book opens with a framing device. It's a short paragraph, and it begins this way. Quote, whatever I could find concerning the story of poor Werther, I've collected and present it to you herewith in the belief that you will thank me for it. You will not want to deny his spirit and character, your admiration and love, nor his fate, your compassion. It goes on a little bit further, but what's going on here with this opening statement? At the very beginning of the Sorrows of Young Werther, we get that initial.

[Peter Milender]

Comment, which is it's. You quoted most of it. It's fairly short, but it precedes the. The book proper. And it comes from a figure who's just referred to as the editor. So there's somebody in this book collecting all the documents, which are mainly letters that we're going to get after this. And his role, for the most part, is fairly neutral. I think it's just worth noticing that in what you read before we get to any of the action, before we ever meet Werther, the title character, the narrator, invites us to sympathize with him. And so this apparently neutral documenter, who's putting this information before us is not so neutral, not entirely neutral. He says, you should admire and love this person. You're going to cry over his fate. So we're set up to sympathize with Werther before he ever sets a foot on stage. And then after that, of course, we're off and running with the first letter in the book.

[John J. Miller]

And that's where the book proper begins. Maybe you might even say the book itself begins. Although that first paragraph, as you say, is important framing device. The first letter. Then this is a book of letters. This is a novel in letters. And we'll talk about that in a moment. But the first letter then from Werther to his friend begins this way. Quote, I can't tell you how glad I am to have gotten away, Unquote. So who is Werther? What is he getting away from and where is he headed?

[Peter Milender]

Well, Vancouver is a young man. He doesn't appear to have any profession, although he is a painter. We learn at the beginning he is getting away for a couple of reasons at least. The main reason, the ostensible reason, is he is off to resolve a question about an inheritance on behalf of his mother. His father's dead, has been dead for a while, and so there's supposed to be inheritance, but there's been a debate about it. He's off to try to get that cleared up. But we also learn at the same time that maybe he's trying to find himself a little bit. Maybe he's trying to get away from some personal entanglements. He refers to a young woman who had sort of fallen for him. It sounds as if that was unintentional on his part, but as if perhaps he might have subconsciously encouraged her a little bit. And so he's cutting himself loose from that attachment. And he also clearly just loves being out of the countryside, being out in nature. So there's a temper, some kind of rejuvenation, some rest and relaxation. And so there's a few things going on. So surface level, clear up the inheritance, but at the same time, cut free from this attachment and get out in the world and enjoy nature a bit.

[John J. Miller]

Is it also telling us, maybe, that this is a guy who flees from his troubles? And can I take the further step and say, here's a foreshadowing of suicide?

[Peter Milender]

It's a good point. And there are several places in the book where we have foreshadowings of suicide, in fact. And the question does he like to get away from his troubles? Werther has some trouble dealing with the world in general. This longing that he has for everything to be, say, authentic, sincere, whole we talked about at the beginning means that he sometimes can't navigate the conventions of society very successfully. So he does try to get away from things. And we might even add. I think we'll probably want to talk later about the way in which this book draws on some elements from the author's life. But Goethe was somebody who repeatedly fled from attachments, including one before he wrote this novel, so maybe something going on there as well. Two people who flee from attachments.

[John J. Miller]

This is an epistolary novel. It's a novel of epistles or letters from Werther to a friend. Why is this the form the novel takes? How are we to read and understand this correspondence?

[Peter Milender]

So it's quite an interesting choice by Goethe, actually, to write this novel in the form of a series of letters. One thing that that does is it. It makes the reader feel very closely attached to Werther. So everything we see is in his. Everything we see comes from his perspective. Now, the epistolary novel was a very popular genre at the time. Other people had been writing in it on the continent and in England. Usually in an epistolary novel, we get letters from at least two people. The kind of. The back and forth, the exchange of people writing and then responding. Sometimes we get letters from a number of people. It's quite interesting in this novel that Goethe gives us only letters from Werther. At the end of it, the editor gives us some points of view that he recounts from others, but the only actual letters are Verto's own. So we get this. Everything comes within his head. And even as he. As the action progresses, as he becomes less stable, I don't know if I want to say he becomes insane. Exactly. That's probably a little too harsh, but certainly more and more unhinged, more and more troubled. It almost creates a kind of claustrophobic feeling for the reader, because you're trapped inside his head as well. So the novel consists of these letters up until the very end. At the end, the editor reinserts himself rather abruptly, which is also a little unusual. Goethe is playing with these conventions in some surprising ways, but for the most part, he has really tried to make sure that everything we get here comes straight out of Werther's somewhat troubled mind.

[John J. Miller]

So we learn his story through his own voice. Through these letters, we learn he's getting away from something. He's also headed toward a woman called Charlotte. Who is she? How do they meet? What's their relationship?

[Peter Milender]

So she is the daughter of the local land steward, a local official. He meets her by accident. He's on the way to a dance. He's been invited by a young woman of his acquaintance to accompany her to a dance. And they're going to pick up another person on the way, and that's this, the Charlotte, or she's called in most of the book Lotte, which would be the. The German diminutive, the nickname for Charlotte. And so they pick up Lotte, and he's actually. Rata's warned by his companion, don't Fall in love with her, sort of teasingly. She's a remarkable person. She's a really wonderful person. But she's already engaged. And so they start to talk in the carriage on the way to the dance. And Werther is sort of taken with her. They arrive at the dance and spend quite a bit of time dancing together. And by the end of the evening, he is thoroughly smitten. There's a wonderful scene when they first meet each other. It's kind of a famous scene that's been portrayed in art a number of times. When he first spots her, he is opening the door to invite her into the carriage. And she is in the house surrounded by her younger siblings. Her mother has died. Her mother's dying wish was for Lotte to sort of take her place. And take care of her brothers and sisters. And so Lotte is standing there, dressed up to go to the dance. With a loaf of bread in her hand. And slicing off pieces for her younger siblings. Who will only take the bread from her. She's so special and so wonderful. And so there's this image of domesticity and family life and joy and harmony. And so that speaks to Verda from the start. By the end of the evening, he's learned that they love to dance. They love the same music, they love the same books. They talk a lot about books and kind of thrill to the same authors. And so he has fallen hard for a woman who, alas, is also engaged.

[John J. Miller]

I don't know if you can control with whom you fall in love. But is this a big mistake? Should Verter not have done this?

[Peter Milender]

Well, I think it's easy to say Vander should not have done this, certainly. And in one sense that's true. And I think Goethe prompts us to ask that question. Werther certainly doesn't think that it was in his power to fall in love or not to fall in love. And maybe it's not in his power entirely. It might be right to say that he can control how he acts on that. Perhaps not the attraction that she exercises upon him. But he's gotten himself into a bad spot. He himself repeatedly talks about her immense appeal and pull. And they do seem to have. What should they say? Kind of a magnetic attraction to each other. So I don't think it's only Werther who's drawn to her. Lotta, in important ways, seems to be drawn to him as well. So from the beginning, it's a rather tricky situation.

[John J. Miller]

And yet she's loyal to the fact that she is engaged to A guy called Albert, who's a successful businessman. She's not gonna break that off.

[Peter Milender]

No, she's not. And it's. I mean, I think Goethe has set this up very carefully. So that we have certain sympathies with all of the characters. So Albert is a longtime friend of hers, going back to childhood. The other half of her mother's dying wish. So she's on her deathbed. The two things she does. One is she sort of charges Lotte with the care of the other children. And the other thing is she says she hopes that she and Albert will be happy together. So expects them to get married. And this has been the plan all along. They are now engaged. Albert's away on business when Werther first appears. And this only contributes to the difficulty. Because he's actually gone for a couple of months before he returns. And so Werther and Lotte have time to strike up a fairly intense friendship before he comes back. But as you say, she's loyal to Albert. Albert is a very reliable, faithful, loving, devoted fiance. And then will become a husband. He has good prospects in the world. He's hardworking in a lot of ways. He's a really good match. Right. He's kind of the perfect husband, you might say. And so we've got this contrast between Werther, who is this romantic person of emotion and passion and feeling and the heart, and Albert, who's a little more of the sensible kind of bourgeois, rational one. And Lotta can see the attractions of both. But for all of her being drawn to Werther is not the type to break off her engagement.

[John J. Miller]

Werther then realizes he's got to get away from the situation. The way out of this predicament is to leave, and he goes somewhere else. And there's this sort of middle part of the book. What does he do? What happens there?

[Peter Milender]

Yeah. So exactly at the midpoint that the novel is divided into two almost equal halves. And so the first half ends with his departure and saying, I've got to extricate myself from the situation. And the second half begins with his having joined somebody called the Envoy, a political official that he's working for. So he's gone to take a job at court. It looks as if he has good prospects there. He seems to be a bright, talented guy. He's hanging out with people who are above his social station. So these are aristocrats. And what happens to him is that he befriends one of the counts who is there, who sees his potential and his promise, but is of a different social class. And so he's hanging out at the count's place. He's there visiting one day without having thought about the fact that this is the day of the week when all of the count's acquaintances come. And so the room starts to. To fill up with these aristocrats who begin looking sort of oddly at Werther. He doesn't realize what's going on, but it becomes clear that they're wondering, why is this fellow in the room? He doesn't belong here. And finally the count has to ask him to leave because his guests are offended by his presence. And so Werther feels insulted, he feels slighted. This is a place in the story where Goethe goes out of his way, I think, to try to map Werther's own personal, individual, emotional struggles onto some social, political complex. Because it's a real class struggle here. This is a young with talent who doesn't see how to kind of break his way through into positions of privilege and power, who's not appreciated for what he has to offer. And so he leaves. At that point, he flees. He spends a month or so with another prince who's invited him just to come and relax and get over it. But very quickly he decides that what he really wants is to be close to Lotte again. And in what I think we can only regard as a foolish decision, ends up returning and inserting himself once again into the relationship among Lotte and Albert.

[John J. Miller]

And we'll get to that in a moment. But what is the purpose of this kind of interlude in another place? Is it just Goethe wanting to insert some social commentary? Or is it an important part of the story where we learn about the characters and their challenges?

[Peter Milender]

I think it's important for the way Goethe uses this to deepen and complicate the tragedy of Werther. So it's very easy to read the book as just a kind of personal struggle. Here's a guy who gets into a bad relationship and has an unfortunate romantic fling, and there's really nothing else going on, which could be very interesting. And we might sort of sympathize with Werther there. But what this episode at court does is kind of add to our sense that Werther really is bumping up against obstacles in life that he is. It's not just his imagination that there are kind of conventions out there that prevent somebody from being authentic and true to himself. There really are people who are doing this. And so when I teach this, I like to kind of remind students it's Very common, I think, in our own world for young people to think that it's hard to find a job. All the good positions are taken. The older generation doesn't understand us. The elites are not solving the problems that confront the country. People aren't really open to new ways of doing things. I mean, these are familiar complaints. We've heard these in other generations. We hear them today. And I think Goethe wants. Wants us to see that, you know, behind Vanta's powerful personality, behind his emotional longings, there is also a real social obstacle. There's a problem there. And so it kind of maps the personal struggle onto a political conflict in a way that makes it, I think, that much more compelling.

[John J. Miller]

Then he returns to Lata and to that bad situation where she's now married. She's actually no longer just engaged to Albert. She's actually married to this guy. What happens then?

[Peter Milender]

At that point, things go fairly rapidly from bad to worse. I mean, the plot of the book is really quite simple in a sense. Werther meets Lotte. He falls in love, realizes he can't have her. He leaves. He has the issue at court, he comes back, and then he sort of unravels. He is so passionately in love that he can't really tear himself away from the situation. Lanta is friends with him. Albert tolerates his presence, but with increasing dissatisfaction and concern that people are talking about the friendship between Werther and Lanta. It's a platonic relationship, so it's not that they're having an affair, but he is disrupting their home life. And ultimately Werther just decides he can't handle this anymore. He can't have the woman that he loves. She's not going to leave her husband. He doesn't want to destroy their marriage. And so he decides that the only way out is for him to commit suicide. And the book ends, really, with his decision to do that.

[John J. Miller]

It's a planned decision. It's a premeditated decision. It's not an act of rashness. He chooses it deliberately. And as this is happening, as he's descending into his despair and his suicidal thoughts, a lot of me is just saying, werther, buck up, young man. You know, I get it. You know, unrequited love, that's a problem. I get it. You had a bad time at court. You have a lot of troubles. You have challenges and so forth. But come on, you're young. Buck up. You know, do better than this. Am I just unsympathetic? You know, the book begins with a call for sympathy and compassion for this young man. And I'm not unsympathetic on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm like, come on, there's a lot of life in front of you. Don't do this.

[Peter Milender]

And I think your. Your lack of sympathy is shared by plenty of readers. Or you might say your frustration with Werther is a common experience. When I. When I teach the book to students, I'll get both kinds of reactions, right? I get some students, and these are undergrads, I'm dealing with some students who will sympathize with Werther and with his plight. But I get quite a few students who think that he should just kind of cut it out, right, and get on with his life. As you said, find somebody else. There are points in the book itself where. There's one point where Lotte says something like that to him. Why can't you find somebody else? We can be friends, but surely there must be somewhere in the world some other woman who could be the right one for you and satisfy your heart. It's also clear that the recipient of Werther's letters, this guy named Wilhelm, who doesn't really appear very much, we don't get to know him as a character. We don't have any of his letters. But we can tell from Werthe's replies that Wilhelm has also been saying to him, you really. You need to move on. You need to extricate yourself. You need to bow to reality and find somebody else. So students have that reaction. You have that reaction. I've even had students describe Werther as a stalker, which I think is maybe a little bit, what, anachronistic? Probably not a concept that would have been in Goethe's mind, but gets it exactly, I think what you're describing, but I would want to sort of push back on it a little bit. So I think we are supposed to be frustrated with Werther. We are supposed to see that he is losing touch with reality in some ways. You read his later letters and they do sound depressed or half crazed or something like that. I always try to find the right word, something like unhinged, maybe might. Might capture it. He is losing touch with reality. And so we're supposed to sense that. But at the same time, Goethe also goes out of his way to plant little hints that maybe he's not so crazy. So, for example, we are reminded in a few places that Lotte might actually feel for him the same way he feels for her. It's not just One sided. There's this one letter in particular, and this is after she's married, when he's returned, when she has a canary bird and she invites the canary onto her hand and says, look, watch how it eats crumbs from my mouth. And so she puts crumbs of bread on her lips and the bird takes them from her and she says, and now let it eat from you also, Werther. And so it does the same thing. So as if the bird is carrying a kiss back and forth between the two of them, she's clearly kind of flirting and leading him on there in a way that she really probably shouldn't. By the end of the book, we get their last scene together is this passionate moment when Werta finally gives in and does embrace her and kiss her. And it seems that she responds to that. So there are ways in which Goethe tries to make sure the reader realizes that it's not just Werther being crazy or locked up in his head. Lotte, when Werta says, I'll put it this way, when Werta says, I think I'm a better match for Lotte than her husband Albert is. There are at least moments in the book when we are encouraged to think, you know, he might be right and Lotta might think he is too. So yes, I think we are absolutely supposed to question what he's doing and share your frustration, John, that you feel with him. But at the same time it's not as if he's totally misreading the situation.

[John J. Miller]

And yet it does end in suicide. And it might make sense now to turn to the reception of this book, which was published in 1774. There was a. Goethe did a revision a few years later, but published in 1774. And it was an immediate sensation, wasn't it? I mean, this, like everybody was reading this book. It was like instantly famous. How famous was it in its day?

[Peter Milender]

This made Goethe's name, it turned him into a European cultural celebrity superstar. It was read all over the place. It was translated into various languages, translated into English within five years. Goethe goes on to become the dominant cultural figure on the European continent for the rest of his life. Really. I mean, he lives fairly long and spans a number of decades and is just this central figure. And it's Werther that starts him off, that launches him on that career. And there are little things that you can read that illustrate the effect the book had. Werthe's clothing is described in the book at one point. And there was a kind of a fad for people to Dress up like Werther. And so people would wear the Werther outfit. It's often been said. I think this has been. I think scholars have more recently cast some doubt upon the veracity of this. But for many years, people said there was a wave of copycat suicides where readers would imitate, sometimes dressed up like Werther would imitate. I don't know if that's actually accurate, but just the fact that that would sound plausible to folks, that suggests the kind of cachet the novel had. Many people, Napoleon had read it. Napoleon, when he conquered Germany, he wanted to meet the author of Werther. And so they did actually meet and discuss it. He was a big fan. So in every kind of way, this was just a hugely successful and popular novel.

[John J. Miller]

Today, we'd say as a number one bestseller, cultural phenomenon. Everyone's talking about it. It's also controversial because of the suicide. And there is this question whether it inspired suicides or not. But does it promote suicide? That's a thing people have said about this. They've worried about this book promoting suicide.

[Peter Milender]

This was certainly one of the criticisms that was made of it at the time, particularly by more conservative or conservative Christian readers, that it seemed to offer a sympathetic portrayal. Suicide. I think that's an overly simplistic reading. This is a book. Almost anything you can say about it, you can find something to be said on a different interpretation, an opposing interpretation. So there are definitely passages in the book where Werther makes the case for suicide. There's a discussion in the first half about Albert's pair of pistols he has hanging on the wall, where Werther and Albert are talking about them. And Werther argues strongly that there are circumstances in which it makes sense for a person to commit suicide in which you can be sort of beaten down by life. We should not regard it, he says, as cowardice if you end up committing suicide to kind of get away from your situation. Because just as there are physical illnesses you can't handle, there could be mental illnesses you can't handle. So we've been kind of set up with that set of arguments that might make us sympathize with suicide. At the end of the book, it is those same pistols, actually. So Goethe brings this back again. Werther borrows Albert's pistols and uses them to commit suicide. So we're reminded of that conversation. But I also think it's very hard to read the end, the suicide itself, and think that Goethe wants us to imagine this could be a good idea. I mean, werther he shoots himself at midnight. He's discovered by a servant at six in the morning, and he's not dead yet. It's actually kind of a bungled suicide attempt, you might say. So he shot himself in the head, but the description says that he. From the marks on the floor and the blood, people could see he had fallen down and kind of thrashed around on the floor for a while. He doesn't actually die until noon. So he's suffering for 12 hours after shooting himself. It's very hard to read that and think, oh, that sounds like a pleasant way to go. I think Goethe is encouraging me to do that. So there is this argument, but I would not want to take it simply as an endorsement of suicide.

[John J. Miller]

We're moving into what literary historians will call the Romantic period. Maybe we're not quite there yet. I do think of the Romantic hero here, you know, sometimes a brooding, melancholic figure. Is he a Romantic hero or is he unheroic? Or help us sort this out. Does he contribute to that mythology of the Romantic hero in any way at all?

[Peter Milender]

Yes. No, absolutely. I think he is. I mean, although we might question him in certain ways he is the heroic figure in the book, even if he's a flawed hero. And it's very appropriate to call him romantic. So you said in your question, maybe it's a little early for Romanticism, but there really sort of two waves of Romanticism. I'm probably going to oversimplify this a little bit, but again, this is sort of how I do it when I teach these things. There's kind of romanticism 1.0 and then 2.0 and early romanticism, of which this book is very much a part. Art is Primarily a German phenomenon, 1770s, 1780s. It's usually referred to by the label Sturmont Wrang, which means an English storm and stress a number of authors associated with it, most of them not widely read now, although Friedrich Schiller, about whom I know you have, have done a show and with whom I think you are even a distant relative, if I'm.

[John J. Miller]

Remembering that is a family legend.

[Peter Milender]

So. So Goethe and Schiller friends and were part of that. They moved away from Romanticism later, but were part of that early Romantic movement. And then there's kind of Romanticism 2.0, which also spreads to England. Romanticism 1.0, the German is very much a reaction against the French Enlightenment. The later phenomenon, which brings in some of the English authors that your readers would know, your listeners would know, people like Wordsworth and Keats and Byron and Shelley. That's in large part a reaction against industrialization. So this is kind of the early stages of Romanticism. And it is very much about this. This hero for whom emotion and passion are critical. If the Enlightenment was about reason, early Romanticism is about the passions, right? If the Enlightenment is about order in the universe, Romanticism is about disorder and chaos. If the Enlightenment is about shedding light on things, Romanticism is about the shadows. And so very much this reaction against that. And Werther fits into that perfectly. And I say Goethe would later kind of of distance himself and even the revisions, I think, to the book, which, I don't know, we need to say a lot about them. They're not. They don't change the plot. It's more very small changes to letters. But they. They also distance himself a little bit from Werther, so he'd move away. But early on, this book absolutely belongs in. That's in that storm and stress period.

[John J. Miller]

One of the things I really like about the book is that it's short. Which is. Which is. Which is not to say I wouldn't have enjoyed it if it was longer. But there aren't enough short books. We sometimes call it a novel. Is it actually a novella? It's about 100 pages in the edition I was reading.

[Peter Milender]

Yeah, it is. It is very short. And actually, one of the things I appreciate about the brevity is it's an easy book to reread. And I would. I would encourage your listeners, if they pick it up and take a look, to think about that, because you see many clues that Gert has planted along the way that you don't notice on a first reading that kind of jump out at you on a second or a third reading. But in terms of the nomenclature, I would call it a novel, actually. So in English, we often we talk about novella and all we really mean is a short novel. But in German literature, the novella, particularly in the 19th century, it's a little after Goethe wrote, this will go on to become a rather specific form. Often the action takes place in a single day. It wouldn't usually be in the form of letters, wouldn't be epistolary. And novellas in the, say, as they develop in the German tradition, almost always depend on some surprising, strange, often supernatural plot twist along the way. So none of that is going on here. So I think appropriate to call this a novel, but just a, as you say, a kind of blissfully short novel.

[John J. Miller]

It's written in German, obviously, for those dumb cuffs among us. Who don't speak a word of German. Is there an edition or translation you would recommend for English speaking readers?

[Peter Milender]

Yeah, so this is. I mean, it's a book you could find in multiple translations over the years, including free versions online. But the one I use when I teach it is the one published by Oxford World's Classics and it's translated by David Constantine. I think it's very nice. It has. Has a helpful introduction, has a few notes, but not a heavy scholarly apparatus. It does indicate places where Goethe made revisions. So you are kind of alerted to whether you're reading something that was in the first version or the second. But it's based on the second revised text and it's a nice readable translation, I think captures the spirit very well.

[John J. Miller]

You mentioned this short novel has autobiographical elements. The author's drawing from his own life. How true is that? And also just give us a sense of. Of Goethe as a figure in German culture because he storms onto the scene with this. But also the best is yet to come in a sense, right?

[Peter Milender]

Absolutely, yes. So the. I mean, we could spend far more time than we want to probably on the autobiographical element. It's a little bit complicated, but this. Another factor that contributes to sort of the interest in this book is it's very much based on some incidents from Goethe's own life. He was part of two successive love triangles. There was a young woman he met whose name was actually Charlotte Lotta. He met her, not realizing that she was already engaged to a fellow named Christiaan Kestner. And so he struck up a close friendship with her and remained friends with the two of them even through their marriage. So Goethe is clearly drawing on that relationship. At one point, Goethe fled. He ran away to kind of extricate himself from the two of them and landed in another love triangle. There was a different woman who was already, I think not quite already married, who was on the verge of being married and did soon marry an older man. And so he was very close friends with her. That husband did not particularly welcome his involvement. Kind of like Albert in the second half of the novel. And then the other piece of autobiographical information is that there was a young man named Karl Jerusalem. Jerusalem, who Goethe had known as students from their student days. And Jerusalem had a very famous suicide. He was in love with a married woman and killed himself. And Goethe actually he asked Kessner, this other guy from the first love triangle, to send him an account. There's all kinds of things he's drawing on from this experience of his own life. I wouldn't call it autobiographical exactly. You wouldn't pick this up to learn about Goethe's life, but he is definitely turning his life into art.

[John J. Miller]

As they say, write what you know, I guess. And for a first work, for a first major work, maybe that's a good strategy. But then he goes on and does many other things. And what does he become in German literary culture, German culture generally?

[Peter Milender]

He becomes the greatest literary figure in the German tradition. I mean, there are others who are quite significant. Schiller would be one, lessing would be another. But Goethe is the kind of towering figure of German letters. And as I suggested before, I think you could really make the case. He is the towering figure on the European, the continental, at least cultural scene for a good 50 years. He lives from 1749 to 1832. That's a reasonably long life. He writes this in 1774, so still a very young man. He's written a play right before this that was popular. He will go on to write many things and it's kind of remarkable, the range of Goethe. So he's best known for the book Faust, which is a drama in verse, not really a drama meant to be performed, more a drama meant to be read, but at least in the form of a play. And Faust is worthy of a show all of its own. We can't even try to get into it here, but it's one of the great works of mine, modern literature, also in two parts. He works on it over the course of most of his life. But Goethe writes a number of plays. He is considered the greatest German lyric poet. He writes a couple of other novels in addition to this. He writes some autobiographical works. Late in his life especially. He's very interested in, you might say, curating the image he will leave to posterity. He's also intensely interested in science. And he himself thought that his scientific work was some of his most most important work. He wrote about optics in particular. So Goethe's color theory is still sometimes. Which is an anti Newtonian color theory. I'm not a scientist, I can't tell you a lot about what that means exactly. But he's very much reacting to Newton's theory of light. And it's still regarded highly in some circles, at least. He's active on the political scene. He's at the court in Weimar, very influential there, politically overseeing all kinds of things. So he's tremendously active, tremendously prolific over a very long period of time in German literature. Literature. The pyramid he's writing would just be called the Goethe Zeit, the Age of Goethe, you'll sometimes see that in English discussions as well. And so really just one of the towering figures of modern European letters, period. And maybe I just. One other comment on that before we leave that aside. If you think about that lifespan, 1749 to 1832, he lives through the American Revolution, he lives through the French Revolution. There are other revolutions in Europe. 1815 is the Congress of Vienna, 1830, end of his life as a revolutionary year. He's living through a very tumultuous period and reacting to all of that. So he's like soaking all of this up, deeply read, widely read, all of that, going into this tremendous body of work that he produces.

[John J. Miller]

Let's wrap up by going back to the start then to the short novel the Sorrows of Young werther, written about 250 years ago. What's the case for reading it now in our time?

[Peter Milender]

So I mentioned at the very beginning, when you asked me what makes it a great book, John, I said there's this, I think this really finely tuned, finely wrought tension between, on the one hand, Goethe wanting us to recognize the value of the perspective that Werther brings to life and also have a kind of critical distance from it. And if I could put a little different, maybe more contemporary spin on that, you could almost think of reading Werther this novel of letters that we get all from his perspective. That's kind of like listening into somebody's Instagram feed today. People will watch a so called influencer and they'll watch the, the Instagram feed or the YouTube or whatever it is, and you get this, this image of a person's life from that person's perspective. And you're always asking yourself, you know, do I want to be like that? Is that a life for me? So here, do I want to be like Werther? Is that the kind of, kind of person I want to be? You imagine yourself into that person's shoes, but at the same time you almost inevitably kind of ask yourself, is it real? Right? You watch a person's Instagram feed and you know, it's a self presentation, you know, that you're getting not just the thing itself, but the way you're supposed to see this person's life. And that theme of appearance versus reality is very prominent in the Sorrows of Young Werther. We could go through kind of letter by letter and find a lot of interesting passages to look at. But I think just that fact that on the one hand you're supposed to sympathize, on the other hand, you're supposed to criticize. Goethe makes it. He prompts us to ask this question, how well do we know Werther? Do we understand him deeply? I quoted that line at the beginning, nobody on this earth ever really understands anybody else. And so there's this kind of conflict between our deep longing to connect with other human beings and the way Goethe displays the obstacles to that connection. And I think for us in the digital age, that's a very timely, timely problem, actually. Also wanting to have that connection, that sense of reality, never quite knowing if we've got it. It could be people, it could be events and fake news. But. So I think Goethe is playing here with ideas that are extremely present in our culture and that people still respond to and can see their own lives in today.

[John J. Miller]

Peter Milander, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe.

[Peter Milender]

John, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

[John J. Miller]

You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through my [e-mail] on Twitter. My handle is at hey Miller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening.