Summary of Frost and Sorrows of Young Werther

The majority of Frost and Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as a collection of letters written
by Werther, a young artist of highly sensitive and passionate temperament, and sent to his friend Wilhelm.

In these letters, Werther gives a very intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of
Wahlheim (based on the town of Garbenheim, near Wetzlar . He is enchanted by the simple ways of the
peasants there. He meets Lotte (Charlotte), a beautiful young girl who is taking care of her siblings
following the death of their mother. In spite of knowing beforehand that Charlotte is already engaged to a
man named Albert, who is in fact 11 years her senior, Werther falls in love with her.

Despite the pain this causes Werther, he spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship
with both of them. His pain eventually becomes so great that he is forced to leave and go to Weimar. While
he is away, he makes the acquaintance of Fräulein von B. He suffers a great embarrassment when he
forgetfully visits a friend on the day when the entire aristocratic set normally meets there. He returns to
Wahlheim after this, where he suffers more than he did before, partially because Lotte and Albert are now
married. Every day serves as a torturous reminder that Lotte will never be able to requite his love. Out of
pity for her friend and respect for her husband, Lotte comes to the decision that Werther must not visit her
so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after Werther's
recitation of a portion of "Ossian".

Werther had realized even before this incident that one of them — Lotte, Albert or Werther himself
— had to die. Unable to hurt anyone else or seriously consider committing murder, Werther sees no other
choice but to take his own life. After composing a farewell letter (to be found after he commits suicide), he
writes to Albert asking for his two pistols, under a pretense that he is going "on a journey". Lotte receives
the request with great emotion and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but doesn't
expire until 12 hours after he has shot himself. He is buried under a linden tree, a tree he talks about
frequently in his letters, and the funeral is not attended by clergymen, Albert or his beloved Lotte.
 His family background

Goethe's father, Johann Caspar Goethe (Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, 29 July 1710 – Frankfurt, 25
May 1782), lived with his family in a large house in Frankfurt, then an Imperial Free City of the Holy Roman
Empire. Goethe's mother, Catharina Elisabeth Goethe (Frankfurt, 19 February 1731 – Frankfurt, 15
September 1808), the daughter of the Schultheiß (mayor) of Frankfurt Johann Wolfgang Textor (Frankfurt,
11 December 1693 – Frankfurt, 6 February 1771) and wife (married at Wetzlar, 2 February 1726) Anna
Margaretha Lindheimer (Wetzlar, 23 July 1711 – Frankfurt, 18 April 1783, a descendant of Lucas Cranach
the Elder and Henry III, Landgrave of Hesse-Marburg), married 38-year-old Johann Caspar when she was
17 at Frankfurt on 20 August 1748. All their children, except for Goethe and his sister, Cornelia Friederike
Christiana, who was born in 1750, died at early ages.

Johann Caspar and private tutors gave Goethe lessons in all the common subjects of that time,
especially languages (Latin, Greek, French, and English). Goethe also received lessons in dancing, riding
and fencing. Johann Caspar was the type of father who, feeling frustrated in his own ambitions by what he
saw as a deficiency of educational advantages, was determined that his children would have all those
advantages which he had not. Goethe had a persistent dislike of the church, characterizing its history as a
"hotchpotch of fallacy and violence" ( Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt). His great passion was drawing.
Goethe quickly became interested in literature; Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Homer were among his
early favourites. He had a lively devotion to theatre as well and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows
that were annually arranged in his home; a familiar theme in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.He also took
great pleasure in reading from the great works about history and religion. He writes of this period:

I had from childhood the singular habit of always learning by heart the beginnings of books, and the
divisions of a work, first of the five books of Moses, and then of the 'Aeneid' and Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. . .
If an ever busy imagination, of which that tale may bear witness, led me hither and thither, if the medley of
fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to bewilder me, I readily fled to those oriental regions,
plunged into the first books of Moses, and there, amid the scattered shepherd tribes, found myself at once
in the greatest solitude and the greatest society.
 Career background

Goethe studied law in Leipzig from 1765 to 1768. He detested learning age-old judicial rules by
heart, preferring instead to attend the poetry lessons of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. In Leipzig, Goethe fell
in love with Käthchen Schönkopf and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre. In 1770, he
anonymously released Annette, his first collection of poems. His uncritical admiration for many
contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Lessing and Wieland. Already at this time,
Goethe wrote a good deal, but he threw away nearly all of these works, except for the comedy Die
Mitschuldigen. The restaurant Auerbachs Keller and its legend of Faust's 1525 barrel ride impressed him
so much that Auerbachs Keller became the only real place in his closet drama Faust Part One. Because his
studies did not progress, Goethe was forced to return to Frankfurt at the close of August 1768.

In Frankfurt, Goethe became severely ill. During the year and a half that followed, because of
several relapses, the relationship with his father worsened. During convalescence, Goethe was nursed by
his mother and sister. Bored in bed, he wrote an impudent crime comedy. In April 1770, his father lost his
patience; Goethe left Frankfurt in order to finish his studies in Strasbourg.

In Alsace, Goethe blossomed. No other landscape has he described as affectionately as the warm,
wide Rhine area. In Strasbourg, Goethe met Johann Gottfried Herder, who happened to be in town on the
occasion of an eye operation. The two became close friends, and crucially to Goethe's intellectual
development, it was Herder who kindled his interest in Shakespeare, Ossian and in the notion of
Volkspoesie (folk poetry). On October 14, 1772 he held a speech in his parental home in honour of the first
German "Shakespeare Day". His first meeting with Shakespeare's works is described as his personal
awakening in literature.[6]

On a trip to the village Sesenheim, Goethe fell in love with Friederike Brion, but, after a couple of weeks,
terminated the relationship. Several of his poems, like Willkommen und Abschied, Sesenheimer Lieder and
Heideröslein, originate from this time.

At the end of August 1771, Goethe was certified as a licensee in Frankfurt. He wanted to make the
jurisdiction progressively more humane. In his first cases, he proceeded too vigorously, was reprimanded
and lost the position. This prematurely terminated his career as a lawyer after only a few months. At this
time, Goethe was acquainted with the court of Darmstadt, where his inventiveness was praised. From this
milieu came Johann Georg Schlosser (who was later to become his brother-in-law) and Johann Heinrich
Merck. Goethe also pursued literary plans again; this time, his father did not have anything against it, and
even helped. Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants'
War. In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a colourful drama. Entitled Götz von
Berlichingen, the work went directly to the heart of Goethe's contemporaries.

Goethe could not subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical (published by Schlosser
and Merck). In May 1772 he once more began the practice of law at Wetzlar. In 1774 Goethe wrote the
book which would bring him worldwide fame, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Despite the immense
success of Werther, it did not bring Goethe much financial gain – copyright law at the time being essentially
nonexistent. (In later years Goethe would bypass this problem by periodically authorizing "new, revised"
editions of his Complete Works.

Bibliography
Main article: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe bibliography

 Goethe: The History of a Man by Emil Ludwig

 Goethe by Georg Brandes
 Goethe: his life and times by Richard Friedenthal
 Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns by Thomas Mann
 Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
 Goethe's World: as seen in letters and memoirs ed. by Berthold Biermann
 Goethe: Four Studies by Albert Schweitzer
 Goethe and his Publishers by Siegfried Unseld
 Goethe: The Poet and the Age (2 Vols.), by Nicholas Boyle
 Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients, by Angus Nicholls
 Goethe and Rousseau: Resonances of ther Mind, by Carl Hammer, Jr.
 Goethe and Schiller , Essays on German Literature, by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
 Tales for Transformation, trans. Scott Thompson
 Goethe Wörterbuch (Goethe Dictionary, abbreviated GWb). Herausgegeben von der
Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, der Akademie der
Wissenschaften in Göttingen und der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Stuttgart. Verlag W. Kohlhammer. ISBN X-0000-2730-6

References
1. ^ According to Gregory Maertz, Goethe was "Germany's greatest man of letters… and
the last true polymath to walk the earth." Cf. Eliot, George (2004) [1871]. Note by editor
of 2004 edition, Gregory Maertz at link. ed. Middlemarch. Broadview Press. pp. 710.
ISBN 1551112337. http://books.google.com/?id=4MopnRJ-
HmMC&pg=PA710&lpg=PA710.
2. ^ "Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th Ed. (2001–2005)".
http://www.bartleby.com/65/go/Goethe-J.html.
3. ^ a b Darwin, C. R. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the
preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life (1st ed.). John Murray.
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?
itemID=F373&viewtype=text&pageseq=165&keywords=goethe.
4. ^ a b Opitz, John (2004). "Goethe's bone and the beginnings of morphology". American
Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 126A (1): 1–8. doi:10.1002/ajmg.a.20619.
PMID 15039967.
5. ^ von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. The Autobiography of Goethe: truth and poetry, from
my own life, Volume 1 (1897), translated by John Oxenford, pp. 114, 129
6. ^ Originally speech of Goethe to the Shakespeare's Day by University Duisburg
7. ^ see Goethe and his Publishers
8. ^ Charlotte_Von_Stein
9. ^ Safranski, Rüdiger (1990). Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. Harvard
University Press. ISBN 0674792750.
10. ^ "Goethe's third summer".
http://www.hamelika.cz/SHAMELIKA/1974/1974_16/h74_16.htm.
11. ^ Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., 1954
12. ^ "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe". The Nature Institute.
http://www.natureinstitute.org/about/who/goethe.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-28.
13. ^ K. Barteczko and M. Jacob (1999). "A re-evaluation of the premaxillary bone in
humans". Anatomy and Embryology 207 (6): 417–437. doi:10.1007/s00429-003-0366-x.
PMID 14760532.
14. ^ Magnus, Rudolf; Schmid, Gunther (2004-09-20). Metamorphosis of Plants. Google
Books. ISBN 9781417949847. http://books.google.com/?
id=0Fjuaog1_E0C&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=intermaxillary+bone+prove. Retrieved
2008-08-28.
15. ^ Goethe, J.W.. Italian Journey. Robert R Heitner. Suhrkamp ed., vol 6.
16. ^ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Nature: Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences (1830), Part 2 Translated by A. V. Miller illustrated, reissue,
reprint Oxford University Press, 2005 ISBN 0199272670, ISBN 9780199272679 [1]
17. ^ Aristotle wrote that color is a mixture of light and dark, since white light is always seen
as somewhat darkened when it is seen as a color. (Aristotle, On Sense and its Objects, III,
439b, 20 ff.: "White and black may be juxtaposed in such a way that by the minuteness of
the division of its parts each is invisible while their product is visible, and thus color may
be produced.")
18. ^ Bockemuhl, M. (1991). Turner. Taschen, Koln. ISBN 3822863254.
19. ^ Goethe, Johann (1810). Theory of Colours, paragraph #50.
20. ^ "Goethe's Color Theory". http://webexhibits.org/colorart/ch.html. Retrieved 2008-08-
28.
21. ^ [2]
22. ^ "The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception".
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA002/English/AP1985/GA002_index.html. Retrieved
2008-08-28.
23. ^ "Goethe's World View".
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA006/English/MP1985/GA006_index.html. Retrieved
2008-08-28.
24. ^ "The Stigma of Suicide – A history". Pips Project.
http://pipsproject.com/Understanding%20Suicide.html. See also: "Ophelia's Burial".
http://elsinore.ucsc.edu/burial/burialSuicide.html.
25. ^ "Goethe in the Roman Campagna". Städel. http://www.staedelmuseum.de/index.php?
id=442. Retrieved 2008-08-28.
26. ^ Karl Hugo Pruys, The Tiger's Tender Touch: The Erotic Life of Goethe. Trans.
Kathleen Bunten. (Edition Q, 1999). ISBN 1883695120.
27. ^ Outing Goethe and His Age, edited by Alice A. Kuzniar (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1996) p.97. ISBN 0804726159.
Outing+Goethe+and+His+Age&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=vSu5SvakI
87ZlAeikNTTDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=snippet&q=venereal
&f=false
28. ^ Outing Goethe and His Age; edited by Alice A. Kuzniar (page number needed)
29. ^ Boyle 1992, 353
30. ^ Venetian Epigrams
31. ^ Venetian Epigrams, 66, ["Wenige sind mir jedoch wie Gift und Schlange zuwider;
Viere: Rauch des Tabacks, Wanzen und Knoblauch und †."]. He wrote a cross symbol
instead of a word. The cross has been variously understood as meaning Christianity,
Christ, or death.
32. ^ Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, Vol II,p.423-424
33. ^ The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian
Theology, SCM Press, London, 1973, p.27-28
34. ^ March 11, 1832, Oxenford translation
35. ^ Goethe in East Germany 1949-1989: Toward a History of the Goethe reception in the
GDR, p.126
36. ^ Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 95
37. ^ quoted in Peter Boerner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1832/1982: A Biographical
Essay. Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1981 p. 82]
38. ^ McCabe, Joseph. 'Goethe: The Man and His Character'. pp. 343
39. ^ [www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?articleId=210582]
40. ^ Webmineral.com. Retrieved 8-21-2009,
41. ^ "The literary estate of Goethe in the Goethe and Schiller Archives". UNESCO Memory
of the World Programme. 2008-05-16. http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=23224&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. Retrieved 2009-
12-15.
42. ^ [3]
 His Educational background

Goethe's early years of education were inconsistent; informally from his

father and then with tutors. However, he managed a grasp of Greek, Latin,
French, and Italian by the age of eight, and his mother taught him well in
the art of story-telling. At the age of sixteen, in 1765, Goethe went to
Leipzig University to study law as his father wished, though he also gained
much recognition from the Rococo poems and lyric he wrote during this
period. In 1766 he fell in love with Anne Catharina Schoenkopf (1746-1810)
and wrote his joyfully exuberant collection of poems Annette.

In 1768 Goethe wrote his Leipzig Songbook (1768)--ten poems to melodies

composed by Bernhard Theodor Breitkopf--while he was convalescing from a
severe lung infection. Nurse Susanne Katharina von Klettenberg, a relative
of his mother's, introduced him to protestant piety and pansophic-
alchemistic works in the neo-platonic tradition.

In 1770 Goethe continued his law studies in Strasbourg as well as attending

lectures in history, political science, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry. He
met daily with philosopher, poet, and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744-1803) avant-gardist of the Sturm und Drang movement. Sesenheimer
(1770-1771) was published, followed by Neue Lieder in Melodien gesetzt
von B.T.Breitkopf (1770), Goethe's first printed anthology of poems. Goethe
earned his degree and was promoted to licentitatus juris in 1771. He
returned to Frankfurt where he began to practice law, though he was much
more absorbed with writing Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a story of a 16th
century robber baron, representing Goethe's youthful protest against the
established order and his desire for intellectual freedom. It would become
his first dramatic success.