Anna’s Thinking Cap Reading Marathon Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther
Anna’s Thinking Cap Reading Marathon 100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels
Anna’s Thinking Cap Reading Marathon
100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels
February 20 - May 31, 2024
Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther
March 5, 2024
December 20, Colma, Ryno, Alpin
Ah, the horror of it all, the sadness, the catastrophic end… Yes, it would have been better for Werther to go away - but where? And how?
The endless, mournful, self-pitying farewell…
“I'd like you to tell my mother that she must pray for her son and that I ask her forgiveness for all the vexation I have caused her. It was my fate to grieve those to whom I owed joy. Farewell, my dearest friend! May all the blessings of heaven be upon you! Farewell!”
Pray for me - and forgive me all my trespasses - the language of Goethe slips into biblical cadences in the final passages of the novel…
“I'd like you to tell my mother that she must pray for her son and that I ask her forgiveness for all the vexation I have caused her. It was my fate to grieve those to whom I owed joy. Farewell, my dearest friend! May all the blessings of heaven be upon you! Farewell!”
The final altercation with Lotte…
“No, Lotte, he exclaimed, I shall not see you again!”
“Werther, you can, you must see us again, but in moderation. Oh, why did you have to be born with this vehemence, this untamed, unyielding passion for everything you touch! I beg you, she continued, taking his hand, Learn moderation!”
But a poet can’t live in moderation - his passion burns in him till it consumes all - or becomes poetry… Remember, Goethe entitled his autobiography “Poetry and Truth”…
“Your mind, your knowledge of so many things, your talents: what a variety of pleasures they offer you! Be a man! Find another direction for this sad devotion to a person who can only pity you.”
It’s a burden to be the chosen one, the muse, the earthly woman elevated on the pedestal of transcendence…
“Can't you tell that you are deluding yourself, that you are willfully destroying yourself! But why me, Werther? Me in particular, someone who belongs to another man? That in particular? I'm afraid, I'm afraid it's only the impossibility of possessing me that makes you want me so much.”
How can he find another object of his burning passion if Lotte alone can fulfil him?…
Albert, the responsible one who must attend to all the mundane details of life, is distant from poetry - Lotte is in the presence of two complete opposite aspects of humanity - between order and ecstasy - between truth and poetry…
“Albert did the same, then asked his wife about certain household tasks, and when he heard that they had not yet been done, spoke a few words to her that struck Werther as cold, indeed harsh.”
But ecstasy or death?…
“Yes, Lotte!
Why should I keep silent? One of the three of us must go, and I want to be the one!”
To say this novel created an international frenzy is an understatement… More in my extra posts…
“When you climb the mountain on a lovely summer evening, remember me, how I so often came up from the valley, and then look out toward the graveyard to my grave, where the wind sways the high grass this way and that in the glow of the setting sun.”
Werther is preparing for a journey - hands out charity in advance, settles his accounts…
Lotte must choose - ecstasy or reality…
“In the meantime Lotte had fallen into a peculiar state of mind. After her last conversation with Werther she had come to understand how difficult it would be for her to part from him and how much he would suffer if he were forced to leave her.
She now saw herself bound forever to the man whose love and fidelity she knew and for whom she felt a deep affection, whose calm and reliability seemed truly heaven-sent as a foundation on which a good woman might build her life's happiness; she knew what he would always be for her and her children.”
Werther had grown so dear to her - if she could only keep both Albert and Werther… Without Werther she would have to close down her soul…
“She had become used to sharing with him all those feelings and thoughts that were of any interest, and his departure threatened to tear open a void in her whole existence that could never be filled. Oh, if in that moment she could have turned him into a brother, how happy she would have been!—If she had been allowed to marry him off to one of her friends, if she could have hoped to reestablish his unbroken relationship with Albert.”
And the final verdict of reality is harsh - “the secret longing of her heart was to keep him for herself; and at the same time she told herself that she could not”…
And now - the reading… Werther’s translation of Ossian into German… Lotte insists… Fingal, Selma, Ullin, Morar, Colma, Salgar, Ryno, Morar, Odgal - epic heroes dealing with epic troubles in an epic world… How these two enraptured readers resemble another couple, Dante Alighieri’s Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, the ones who read of the forbidden love of yet another doomed couple, Lancelot and Guinevere…
From Inferno, Canto V:
As we for pastime one day reading were
How Lancelot by love was fettered fast—
All by ourselves and without any fear—
Moved by the tale our eyes we often cast
On one another, and our colour fled;
But one word was it, vanquished us at last.
When how the smile, long wearied for, we read
Was kissed by him who loved like none before,
This one, who henceforth never leaves me, laid
A kiss on my mouth, trembling the while all o’er.
The book was Galahad, and he as well
Who wrote the book. That day we read no more.’
And while one shade continued thus to tell,
The other wept so bitterly, I swooned
Away for pity, and as dead I fell:
Yea, as a corpse falls, fell I on the ground.
“That day we read no more.” Books are seducers, they lead the readers astray, into a world of unrealizable and destructive dreams, reality bends into an unrecognizable and alluring apparition that is ever so much more desirable than truth… I just summarized Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote… And at 24 Goethe knew this too… Poetry seduces the mind and soul away from reality - and is infinitely more desirable than truth…
“A flood of tears pouring from Lotte's eyes and freeing her anguished heart checked Werther's song. He threw the pages down, grasped her hand, and wept the bitterest tears.
Lotte rested her head on her other hand and hid her eyes in a handkerchief. The emotions of both were agonizing. They felt their own misery in the fate of those noble figures, felt it together, and their tears united them. Werther's lips and eyes burned on Lotte's arm; a shudder overcame her; she wanted to distance herself, and pain and commiseration numbed her like lead. She breathed deeply to recover herself and begged him, sobbing, to continue, begged with the full voice of heaven! Werther was trembling, his heart was about to burst, he raised the page and read in a breaking voice:
The full force of these words fell upon the unhappy man.
He threw himself down before Lotte in complete despair, grasped her hands, pressed them to his eyes, to his brow, and a foreboding of his terrible resolve appeared to fly through her soul. Her senses became confused, she squeezed his hands, pressed them against her breast, bent over him with a plaintive gesture, and their glowing cheeks touched.
The world faded from them. He flung his arms around her, pressed her to his breast, and covered her trembling, stammering lips with furious kisses.-Werther!”
That kiss, the most famous kiss in German literature - I would even venture to say one of the most famous literary kisses ever - the kiss that inspired Thomas Mann’s 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar - which I just finished reading… More in my extra commentary this week…
“He did not resist, released her from his arms, and, insensate, threw himself down before her.—She tore herself upward, and in anxious confusion, trembling between love and fury, she said-This is the last time! Werther! You will never see me again.”
Faust will go for a walk outside the city gate too, on a bright spring day, and walk back to the city followed by a poodle - who will turn into Mephistopheles in the gloom of Faust’s study…
“He came to the city gate. The watchmen, who knew him, let him go out without a word.”
Do you remember all the sublime nature descriptions in the novel - and all the sublime Caspar David Friedrich paintings I’ve been posting? Werther climbed those slopes on a gloomy winter night - just like Goethe will climb the Harz Mountains in inclement weather and reach the summit of the Brocken - where the Witches’ Sabbath will occur at the end of Part One of Faust…
“Only much later was the hat found on a crag that overlooks the valley from the slope of the hill, and it is beyond understanding how he could have climbed it on a wet and gloomy night without plunging down.
He went to bed and slept for a long time.”
Werther could never get over the loss of his beloved…
“I had a friend, a woman, who was everything to me in my vulnerable youth; she died, and I walked behind her dead body and stood at her grave as they lowered her coffin and yanked away the creaking ropes from underneath and drew them up again; then the first shovelful of clods rolled down, and the dreaded box gave back a dull thud, and duller and duller, and finally it was covered!— I threw myself down beside the grave—my innermost being stirred, appalled, terrified, torn, but I did not know what was happening to me—what will happen to me—To die! Grave! I do not understand these words!
Oh, forgive me! forgive me!”
Young people memorized the final sections of the novel by heart… The desperation of “Werther” became the desperation of generations of its readers…
“Oh, forgive me! forgive me! Yesterday! It should have been the last instant of my life. Oh you angel! For the first time, for the first time without any doubts, a blissful feeling glowed in the innermost depths of my being: She loves me! she loves me! my lips still burn with the sacred fire that streamed from yours; a new, warm rapture is in my heart.
Forgive me! forgive me!”
“All that is fleeting, but no eternity shall snuff out the glowing life that I savored yesterday on your lips, that I feel in me! She loves me! This arm embraced her, these lips trembled on her lips, this mouth stammered on hers. She is mine! You are mine! Yes, Lotte, for all eternity.”
“He will comfort me until you come and I fly to meet you and hold you and stay with you in never-ending embraces before the countenance of the Infinite Being. I am not dreaming, I am not delirious! Close to the grave, I see more clearly. We shall be! We shall see one another again! See your mother!
I shall see her, find her, ah, and pour out my whole heart to her! Your mother, your likeness.”
The pistols come from Albert… Lotte hands the box to the servant…
"Would you lend me your pistols for a trip I plan to take?
Farewell! All the best!"
“They had kept a silence between them for so long, and should she be the first to break that silence and, precisely at an inappropriate moment, make such an untoward disclosure to her husband?”
And Lotte?
“Werther, who was lost to her, whom she could not let go, whom she, sadly! had to leave to his own devices and who, if he were to lose her, had nothing left.”
How to explain to Albert the ecstasy and terror of her heart?
“She found him occupied with opening and reading the packets. Several seemed to contain less than pleasant news. She asked him a few questions, to which he gave curt answers, and he stood at his desk to write.”
Albert supplied the pistols… Lotte handed them to the servant…
“Give him the pistols.— wish him a good journey, he said to the young servant.”
“These words left her thunderstruck, she staggered to her feet, barely conscious of what she was doing. Slowly she went to the wall; trembling, she took down the pistols, wiped the dust from them and hesitated, and would have delayed even longer if Albert had not urged her on with a searching look.
Unable to utter a word, she gave the fatal instruments to the boy, and when he had left, she gathered up her work and went to her own room in a state of the most unutterable uncertainty.”
“The boy brought the pistols to Werther, who took them from him in raptures when he heard that Lotte had given them to him. He had bread and wine brought to him, sent the boy off to his dinner, and sat down to write:
They have passed through your hands, you have wiped the dust from them, I kiss them a thousand times, you have touched them: And you, celestial spirit, you favor my decision, and you, Lotte, are handing me the implement, you from whose hands I wished to receive my death, and ah! receive it now.”
William Dyce (1806-1864), Francesca da Rimini (That day we read no more…), 1837, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
