FULL LEATHER BINDING WITH GILT LETTERING, L.& S. BOER- EN kUNSSENTRUM, jOHANNESBURG, 1946, AFRIKAANS TEXT, 158 PAGES, CONDITION: NEW.
The Sorrows of Young Werther is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.
The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life, and involving triangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff (who married Kestner); and the other involved Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano, Maximiliane von La Roche (who married Brentano), and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem committed suicide on the night of Oct 29 or 30, 1772. He shot himself in the head with a pistol borrowed from Kestner. These events are fictionalized to describe the emotional tumult of the titular character Werther, who kills himself in despair after he falls in love with a woman engaged to another man.
Werther was one of Goethe's few works aligned with the aesthetic, social and philosophical ideals that pervaded the German proto-Romantic movement known as Sturm und Drang, before he and Friedrich von Schiller moved into Weimar Classicism. The novel was published anonymously, and Goethe distanced himself from it in his later years, regretting the fame it had brought him and the consequent attention to his own youthful love of Charlotte Buff, then already engaged to Johann Christian Kestner. Although he wrote Werther at the age of 24, it was all for which some of his visitors in his old age knew him. Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then, even denouncing the Romantic movement as "everything that is sick."
Goethe described the powerful impact the book had on him, writing that even if Werther had been a brother of his whom he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by his vengeful ghost. Yet, Goethe substantially reworked the book for the 1787 edition] and acknowledged the great personal and emotional influence that The Sorrows of Young Werther could exert on forlorn young lovers who discovered it. He later commented to his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann on January 2, 1824 (as it was recorded by Eckermann and published in his book, Gespräche mit Goethe):
(...)
The conversation now turned on Werther. That, said Goethe, is a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. It contains so much from the innermost recesses of my breastso much feeling and thought, that it might easily be spread into a novel of ten such volumes. [...]
(...)
On considering more closely the much-talked-of Werther period, we discover that it does not belong to the course of universal culture, but to the career of life in every individual, who, with an innate free natural instinct, must accommodate himself to the narrow limits of an antiquated world. Obstructed fortune, restrained activity, unfulfilled wishes, are not the calamities of any particular time, but those of every individual man; and it would be bad, indeed, if every one had not, once in his life, known a time when Werther seemed as if it had been written for him alone."
