Lecture 6: Sturm und Drang - Goethe‘s Werther

• Herder‘s Impact

• Frankfurt

• Straßburg - and its impact on the novel

• Werthertracht

• Structure and themes of Werther

• Comments on the novel

• Sturm und Drang Topics in Werther

• Dual structure of the novel

• Homework

Herder‘s impact on the movement

• Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

• arrived in Straßburg in September 1770 and stayed there till April 1771

• his Journal einer Reise im Jahre 1769 describung reflections on his journey from Riga to France and Germany can be seen as the first Sturm und Drang writing

• Herder is older than all the other Stürmer und Dränger, served as a leading figure in stressing the importance of regional and folk literature and its spiritual powers (versus the ideal of equanamity, versus the ‚bookish‘ world of the Enlightenment)

• transmitter of Ossianic poems and of Klopstock

Frankfurt (Plan und Ansicht der Freien Reichsstadt, 1749)

Straßburg / Strasbourg (kolorierter Kupferstich, about 1770)

Straßburg / Strasbourg

• enchanting in the beauty of the surrounding countryside (Sesenheim)

• dominated by ist superb minster: the idea of freedom

• more relaxed as a city of southwestern Alsatian charm - a place where the French and the German culture meets

• far less ceremonious than Leipzig

• Herder‘s new reading list: Homer, Pindar, Shakespeare, Ossian, Hamann, the English novelists, Sterne and Goldsmith, folk poetry

Werthertracht

• blauer Frack mit Messingknöpfen, gelbe Weste, englische Reithose aus gelbem Leder, Stiefel mit aanliegenden Stulpen, runder grauer Filzhut und lockeres gepudertes Haar

Goethe‘s Werther (first published in 1774)

• excited sensibility, free of all preconceived religious or social restraints

• original subject, invented, biographical material used but transformed

• written within 3 months, Feb - April 1774

• an autonomous individual defines itself in a natural setting (rural setting vs city vs court)

• original in its narrative structure: mainly 1st person singular perspective and letter- or diary-style; with a few comments by an editor-like narrator, who later takes over; epistolary novel

• accounts which convey Werther‘s growing terror of the inescapable consequences of his belief in total feeling and love - these accounts become in the course of the narrative more and more oblique and desperate - reveal Werther‘s Krankheit zum Tode

Illustrations from an early edition of Werther

“To read Werther as a sentimental love story or to interpret it as primarily a document of social protest is to miss Goethe’s intention.” (Victor Lange, The Classical Age of German Literature. 1740-1815 [London 1982], p. 74)

Goethe‘s novel reveals “a state of mind of hitherto unrecorded complexity, of emotions from delicate lyricism to the agonies of doubt, frustration and despair. (...) Werther is, above all, a cry for understanding and overwhelmed by an altogether new kind of serious narrative. For many of its details the novel draws on Goethe’s own exuberant love for another Charlotte. But beyond these autobiographical ingredients, the book conveys the first attempt on the part of a deeply perceptive but equally self-critical poet who shows the problematic, even tragic, implications of the discovery of feeling that had given his generation a new sense of strength.”(Victor Lange, The Classical Age of German Literature. 1740-1815 [London 1982], pp. 74f.)

Sturm und Drang topics in Werther

• ‘nature’ as a creative source / ‘nature’ as a destructive force = interest in complex, dialectic structures

• man and ‘his’ total perception: powerful energy, defiant authenticity, excited sensibility, but also isolation, self-pity and self-doubt - development towards a complex psychology

• the poet as the supreme example of a ‘genius’

• radical dissolution in form: stress on the inner form of a work of art; denial of poetic norms

• difficult position of the young generation seeing itself isolated from the court life and from the (petit) bourgeois life of the older generation

• closeness to folk life and culture (anti-cultural protest)

Erster Theil• 4. May 1771 - 10. Sept 1771 • Homer• ...

Zweyter Theil • 20. Okt 1771 - 24. Dez 1772 • Ossian • ...

How to prepare next week‘s seminars?

• Analyse the structure of the letter from August, 12th (pp. 92-102) dealing with suicide. Why do you think it was regarded as a scandal?

• The novel knows not only Werther‘s narrative voice as depicted in his letters and diary-like confessions; it also knows the editor‘s voice.

• A) When does the editor‘s voice appear in the novel?• B) What is its function?• C) Do you think the narrative structure can be described as a stable one throughout the novel?

• Why is a copy of Lessing‘s tragedy Emilia Galotti lying on Werther‘s desk, when he commits suicide?

• Inform yourself about the (auto)biographical background of the novel. How does it function as a source of the text?