Las penas del joven Werther

Published in 1774 and revised in 1787, The Sorrows of Young Werther is perhaps one of the most influential works in world literature. The "Werther effect" not only created literary trends and fashions, but also a peculiar wave of suicides. It was a favorite book of Napoleon and also of Frankenstein's monster. Everyone—classicists and romantics alike—wanted to claim it as their own: it was an icon of sentimentality and a hero of revolutionary fervor; it was also, as Thomas Mann said, "the horror and dread of moralists." At the end of his life, Goethe lamented that most of the young people who made pilgrimages to Weimar to visit him only knew this one work of his. Today, reading about the misfortunes of this young bourgeois artist who, as a result of a forbidden love, discovers his unexpected kinship with the mad, the humble, the unfortunate, and even murderers does not eliminate either detachment or identification. Werther continues to ask us whether compromise is a necessity or a surrender. He continues to point to our self, and what it means to preserve it. He continues to speak of ourselves.