Werther, the Undead

Summary

CONSIDERING THE LOGICAL, calculated, and entirely deliberate manner in which Werther puts an end to his life, it is wholly remarkable that this most spectacular of literary suicides proved to be, at the same time, one of the great undead of Western literature—undead not only in the minds of his enraptured readers, but also in the mind of his author. For Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) remained very much an ongoing concern. Nothing could be further from the truth, in Goethe's autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit, than his statement that with the publication of the book he was completely done with the entire matter of Werther and his sorrows—“die Sache war für mich völlig abgetan” (FA 1.14:641).

What do we mean by “undead?” The OED of 1994, with customary precision, tells us that the word means “clinically dead but not put at rest.” An undead creature will haunt the living, preoccupy their imagination, and revisit the sites of his suffering. He becomes a revenant, or a vampire, that is to say, according to Webster's New World Dictionary, “a corpse animated by an undeparted soul or demon that periodically leaves the grave and disturbs the living.”

Werther's suicide constitutes the most sensational aspect of Goethe's brief but powerful epistolary novel. As the documents in the familiar collections assembled by Peter Müller and Karl Robert Mandelkow testify, the book had an unprecedented impact on Goethe's contemporaries, and to a large, though incalculable, extent this may be attributed to the memorable manner of Werther's exit.