The Sorrows of Young Werther
A young man's unreturned love told in his own letters. The book that gave its name to the Werther effect.
Werther, a young man of intense feeling, settles in a country district and attaches himself to Lotte, a woman already promised to the steady and decent Albert. His letters to his friend Wilhelm follow the attachment as it hardens against a situation that does not move; he takes a post elsewhere, returns, and finds nothing altered in his favour.
For a clinician, the correspondence records idealisation forming in real time: Lotte gathers every virtue to herself while the surrounding world thins to whatever bears on her. Goethe shows how unreturned love can organise a whole inner life, and how despair contracts until one figure holds the entire reason for living. The sociologist David Phillips gave the pattern of imitative suicide its name, the Werther effect, in a 1974 American Sociological Review paper documenting a measurable rise in suicides after a publicised case, a phenomenon since examined in media-reporting research.
About the author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer and statesman whose work spans poetry, fiction, and drama, alongside studies in natural philosophy. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) brought him fame across Europe while he was still young. He spent much of his life at the court of Weimar, holding administrative office. Faust, which he worked on for decades and completed shortly before his death, is regarded as his central achievement and a foundation of German literature.
Details
- 1774
- German