Werther's Goethe and the Game of Literary Creativity

Roman S. Struc is a professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the
University of Calgary.

The object of Vincent’s study is the first German novel to become a
European bestseller, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
More narrowly, the study concentrates on the second edition of the novel
(1787), which Goethe scholarship over the past 200 years has written off
as showing only minor stylistic, aesthetic, and narrative improvements,
in addition to a general toning down of the passionate voice of the
first; these changes, it is commonly supposed, were due to the
beneficial influence of Charlotte von Stein, Goethe’s friend, mentor,
and (possibly) lover.

Vincent argues that the changes Goethe made in the second edition are
much more significant than scholars have allowed, and that the passion
characteristic of the first edition was carried over—and possibly even
intensified—in the second. The conventional reading of the novel’s
two versions has been based on the common assumptions about Goethe’s
turbulent and unhappy experiences in the 1770–74 period. Without
rejecting these assumptions, Vincent chooses to focus instead on the
intervening years between the two versions (1774–1787), a period that
contained Goethe’s passionate involvement with a married woman.
Vincent urges the reader to reread the second version in the light of
this broader period, not merely the more limited one that preceded the
publication of the original version.

In addition to being an informative and pioneering study of the second
edition of Werther, this study is a lesson to those who rely too much on
received opinion without critically examining it. As Vincent puts it, it
makes a case for rereading.