In the first letter of Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Werther mentions an issue of inheritance that he has been asked to resolve. “Du bist so gut, meiner Mutter zu sagen” he tells Wilhelm, “daß ich ihr Geschäfte bestens betreiben, und ihr ehstens Nachricht davon geben werde.”¹

Ich habe meine Tante gesprochen [he continues] und habe bey weiten das böse Weib nicht gefunden, das man bey uns aus ihr macht, sie ist eine muntere heftige Frau von dem besten Herzen. Ich erklärte ihr meiner Mutter Beschwerden über den zurückgehaltenen Erbschaftsanteil. Sie sagte mir ihre Gründe, Ursachen und die Bedingungen, unter welchen sie bereit wäre alles heraus zu geben, und mehr als wir verlangten—Kurz, ich mag jezo nichts davon schreiben, sag meiner Mutter, es werde alles gut gehen. Und ich habe, mein Lieber! wieder bey diesem kleinen Geschäfte gefunden: daß Mißverständnisse und Trägheit vielleicht mehr Irrungen in der Welt machen, als List und Bosheit nicht thun. Wenigstens sind die beyden leztern gewiß seltner. (4A)

The subject of his aunt’s inheritance is dropped as quickly as it is brought up—exactly like several other matters of inheritance that come up later in the novel: on May 27, 1771, Werther encounters a young woman whose family is away fighting for an inheritance that she claims his relatives want to cheat him out of (15A); on July 11, 1771, Frau M. attempts to prepare her successor for the household debts she will inherit; and when Werther meets Lotte on June 16, 1771, the first information he receives about Albert, her fiancé, is that he is away settling an estate (20A).² The contested inheritance is far from unknown in the Sturm und Drang: it is a pivotal issue in Klinger’s dramas Sturm und Drang and Die Zwillinge (1776), and in Schiller’s Die Räuber. In Werther, the most widely read text of Sturm und Drang, issues of inheritance come up regularly, and each time Werther hears of a contested inheritance, he either ignores it or passes censure on it as a matter of no importance. Typical is his attitude toward his mother’s request. “Es werde alles gut gehen,” he says. But by the end of the novel there is no indication that he ever resolved the affair.

If Goethe begins his first novel with a problem of inheritance, it is because the question of what eighteenth-century Germans inherit as Germans is very much on his mind in this book.³ While throughout Western Europe the second half of the century saw a new attachment to one’s native soil, German writers were of two minds about what they should value in their culture. The situation appears quite graphically in the Urfaust, the famous draft of Faust I, where the vast difference between Faust’s values and those of Margarete, a simple young woman of the German Volk, effectively splits the play in half.⁴ Germany was, in a sense, two different places at once: on the one hand, a fragmented social and political world made up of approximately 314 principalities, bishoprics, and free cities; on the other, the “Land der Dichter und Denker” that Madame de Staël discovered when she traveled to Germany at the end of the century. A tradition of abstracting away from their particularist world spans German literature from the medieval verse of Neidhart von Reuenthal to the odes of Klopstock, and Goethe’s brief obsession with such abstraction brought him, as he tells us in Dichtung und Wahrheit, close to suicide. He wrote Werther, he said, to free himself from a “stormy element” that threatened to destroy him.⁵ The book appears to have fulfilled its liberating function, for in 1775 he traded the sixteenth-century rebellion of Götz von Berlichingen and the more recent Schwärmerei of Werther for the stodgy life of the Weimar court. In choosing what one of those tiny principalities, limited as it might be, could offer him, he quickly put distance between himself and Sturm und Drang. But in his flight he gave expression to a particular arrogance that belongs to the German 1770s—a cold undercurrent of German Empfindsamkeit, which, as I will suggest, may have its roots in another, much older German tradition.

As Werther opens, we see a bright young member of the upper middle class turn away from the most promising inheritance that can come down to an educated but untitled German of the eighteenth century: employment in the state service. Werther claims the other German inheritance, one elusive, immaterial, and ultimately dangerous: the path laid out by the poets Albrecht von Haller and Friedrich von Klopstock. The path he chooses is not one that leads through what is possible in practice under current eighteenth-century German conditions, but rather through what is possible in the unconditioned world of the imagination. Goethe appears to have written Werther to demonstrate that despite the triviality of the society and politics of his time and place, the limited conditions Germany offered still made up an inheritance more dangerous to reject than to accept. Although Werther’s story is presented through an essentially one-sided correspondence, through these letters to his stabler friend Wilhelm, the epistolary form still sets up a contrast, here between two very different ways to be German in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, there is Wilhelm’s commitment to inherited civil conditions, a commitment shared by Lotte’s fiancé Albert. On the other, there is Werther’s indulgence in the imagination, which lets him dream his way into a realm of unconditioned absolutes. It turns out that contrasting figures like Wilhelm and Werther are quite common in Sturm und Drang: Klinger, in Sturm und Drang, opposes Wild and Blasius. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Eduard Allwills Briefsammlung (1775–76) gives us Allwill, a character combining the seeker after the conditioned and the seeker after the unconditioned within a single figure, who is urged by his friend Luzie to find a middle path.⁶ These same two possibilities are, of course, open to Werther, after whom Jacobi patterned the character of Allwill: on the one hand, the choice to exercise his fantasy, live in the hereafter, and devote himself to something he cannot have; or, on the other hand, to choose the slower alternative—take the laws of his time and place seriously, avail himself of his mother’s connections, and begin a career at the legal office.

Understanding how Goethe frames these two possibilities in Werther requires that we first look at how the idea for the book first took hold of Goethe’s imagination. Soon after receiving his law degree in 1771, Goethe began a three-and-one-half-month apprenticeship at the Reichskammergericht, the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire in Wetzlar. Working in the Reichskammergericht was a family tradition: Goethe’s maternal great grandfather, Dr. Cornelius Lindheimer, was an attorney there from 1697 to 1722, as was his maternal grandfather Johann Wolfgang Textor and his father, who served from 1734 to 1738. When Goethe was there in the 1770s, the court employed about nine hundred attorneys, notaries, readers, chancellors, copyists, and envoys, and like every German administrative office of any size, the staff was a blend of aristocracy and middle class. Throughout Germany’s decentralized bureaucracy, there were so many positions to be filled that, at least since the twelfth century, there had been no other choice but to hire officials from outside the nobility. The Reichskammergericht had had its seat in Wetzlar since 1693, when its former home in Speyer was destroyed by the French, and when it came there, this small, struggling town with a pronounced medieval flavor quickly turned into a thriving cosmopolitan community. For the sake of parity, the formerly Protestant town now had Catholic services, a cloister, and a Jesuit college. Unfortunately, however, there also developed a sharp social division between the approximately nine hundred employees of the Reichskammergericht and the rest of the town, whose population had grown to about four thousand by 1770. As the suppliers of goods and services, the original citizens of Wetzlar had begun to feel like employees of the court, while even middle-class members of the Reichskammergericht felt superior to ordinary citizens of Wetzlar. Only the Wetzlar upper-middle class socialized with those attached to the court, and of course within the Reichskammergericht itself, Präsidenten and Assessoren considered it below their dignity to associate with Prokuranten and Advokaten, to say nothing of lowly clerks and Legationssekretäre. These were factors that contributed to what Werther would describe on December 24, 1771, as “die fatalen bürgerlichen Verhältnisse” (75A).

But while Werther’s problem is one of class, it is a rather complex class problem whose origins reach far into the German past. To understand the “awkward civil conditions” behind Werther’s demise, one must first understand the ambiguous position of the middle-class bureaucrat who worked side by side with his aristocratic counterpart in the German bureaucracy. The middle-class Beamter was there, first of all, because employment in provincial and city governments was virtually the only way for a member of the middle class to advance himself, and the state offices of German absolutist government brought more security and prestige than being a mere advocate or notary.⁷ A position in the chancellery also brought with it privileges that helped give the middle-class bureaucrat a special position between bourgeois and nobleman; even the lowest member of the chancellery was exempt from taxation and could be tried only by the chancellery, and not by the city according to its statutes.⁸ Over several years it was possible to work one’s way up to a higher position—Justus Moser (1720–94) did just that, eventually becoming Kanzleidirektor in Osnabrück. There were more applicants than positions even by the 1730s, and far more by the end of the 1760s. Appointments were much sought after—even Hamann, himself a critic of the German bureaucracy, entered the state bureaucracy in 1763 and again in 1767 in Königsberg.

Procuring such a position depended not only on one’s academic qualifications and embracing the right religion, but also having the right connections. Applicants with family ties to the government had by far the best chances, and even Justus Moser was not above using his influence to give family members a better chance at government positions. The result was that the middle-class Beamter became virtually a class unto itself, “on the one hand without the opportunity to enter the nobility, on the other hand possessed of the highest possible positions for the middle class, officially representing the absolute state.”⁹ Whereas noblemen almost always had the highest positions, they were not always trained lawyers, even though for the same appointments, a middle-class applicant needed a law degree. Moreover, even officials at the lower levels of city, provincial, or imperial bureaucracies were usually better educated than those at the top. Middle-class bureaucrats, whose rigor and efficiency was their bond, took their conduct very seriously and were generally better informed and more competent than the noblemen working with them. It was an odd situation, and one duplicated nowhere else in Europe. Middle-class bureaucrats made many of the most important decisions themselves and, aware that they were an indispensable part of their increasingly complex German absolutist governments, they took pride in their work.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the noblemen who depended on them made sure they were banned from aristocratic society—for example, as we know from the pages of Werther, the chancellery’s official ceremonies were usually segregated.

While Goethe was in Wetzlar, the Reichskammergericht underwent an audit, which by all accounts was performed even more slowly and inefficiently than the court handled its cases. The delegation, which was in town from 1767 to 1776, consisted of twenty-four envoys (Gesandte, or Subdelegierte) and numerous clerks and legal secretaries (Legationssekretäre). One of these legal secretaries was Karl-Wilhelm Jerusalem (1747–72), whose suicide after a snub by aristocratic society at the home of Graf von Bassenheim was an important inspiration as Goethe set out to write the novel. Jerusalem, who arrived in 1771 and worked directly for one of the envoys, came, like Goethe, from a relatively wealthy and powerful family: he was the son of the well-known Braunschweig theologian Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem (1709–89). The prince of Braunschweig was a family friend, and Justus Moser was a relative and frequent visitor. But like Werther, Jerusalem failed to take advantage of the social opportunities that Moser would exploit. Goethe had met Karl-Wilhelm Jerusalem seven years before in Leipzig and became quite interested in him but, like Jerusalem’s other colleagues, never seems to have gotten very close to him. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, where Goethe describes, among other things, Jerusalem’s blue frock coat and yellow vest, he also depicts the young lawyer in a seemingly contradictory way—as melancholy, yet also level-headed and well-meaning.¹¹

Added to this seeming contradiction is an apparent insufficiency in Goethe’s description of Jerusalem: there was, by all accounts, a cold side to the man that contrasts oddly to the melancholy side mentioned by Goethe. According to reports of his few close friends, Jerusalem considered himself a stoic and believed that individuals could be masters over their lives and deaths.¹² Lessing, who briefly corresponded with Jerusalem, called him “einen wahren, nachdenkenden, kalten Philosophen,” while Kielmannsegge, apparently Jerusalem’s best friend, called his friend’s thinking “Starkgeisterei.”¹³ Yet in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe looks away from this cold, arrogant, side of Jerusalem—the high-strung, brooding loner who resented his subordinate position at the Reichskammergericht and spoke more than once of suicide.¹⁴ Jerusalem’s letters to his father also speak to the cold aspect of his personality: they are full of mockery of the methods of the Reichskammergericht and its auditors.¹⁵ At one point, in an effort to break Jerusalem’s arrogance, the envoy to whom he was subordinate gave him archival duties for six hours a day and would not allow him to do the legal work for which he was trained.¹⁶ For Jerusalem the end would come as he fell in love with Elisabeth Herd, the wife of another legal secretary. He declared his love for her on October 28, 1771, and on the next day, after being banned from the house by her and her husband Philipp, committed suicide after borrowing a pair of pistols from a fellow legal secretary, Johann Christian Kestner (1741–1800). The motives for Jerusalem’s suicide are complex, including, of course, his attachment to Elisabeth Herd, which led to being banned from the house, and the matter of his attitude: an arrogant resistance to subordination, which led to punishment in the workplace and a reprimand after staying too long at Graf von Bassenheim’s party.

What may have come across as arrogance in Karl-Wilhelm Jerusalem’s manner was in one respect a symptom of eighteenth-century thought. For that century, more than any other before it, felt justified in replacing inherited rules with personal moral legislation: in 1712 Shaftesbury called the artist “a second Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove”;¹⁷ in 1759 Edward Young declared that humankind was “ignorant of [its] own powers” and spoke of taking “bold excursions of the human mind”;¹⁸ and Rousseau would open his autobiography by maintaining: “I may be no better, but at least I am different.”¹⁹ But not a few writers of the eighteenth century advised against the stoical attitude that imagines itself free of the demands of specific cultures: while Diderot, in his dialogue Rameau’s Nephew (1823; written 1761–74?), warned of replacing moral conduct with sheer intellect, Hamann was equating reason and wit with dissimilation.²⁰ Vico warns in The New Science (1725) that we are being “made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection.”²¹ Rousseau, writing his Confessions in the 1760s, tries to excuse the overly rational conduct of Madame de Warens as “a fault of nature.”²² And Hegel, summing up this trend in the Phenomenology of Mind (1807), maintains that so-called reine Einsicht was the great weakness of the Enlightenment.²³ Among the voluminous secondary literature on Werther, Eric A. Blackall approaches this aspect of Goethe’s novel most closely, noting that the suffering of Werther alluded to in the title is the result of his inability to find a satisfying order of existence within himself. “Ultimately,” writes Blackall, “the book is about the quest for order—order not in the sense of social or domestic order, but as the basic ontological necessity.”²⁴ Werther’s subject is not only nature and freedom, but also the attempt “to construct an artificial world as a surrogate for reality.”²⁵

But I think we can go further than this, tying in the contradictory social status of the German middle-class bureaucrat with the historical Jerusalem and the fictitious Werther. Unfortunately, we have become accustomed to speaking of Werther’s frustration at the legal office as a matter of the failed ambition of an oppressed middle class. Of course, this is the way the matter was approached during a conversation about the novel between Goethe and Napoleon in October 1808.²⁶ But if we take the parallels between Werther and Jerusalem seriously, which I think we should, it is hard not to conclude that a good portion of Werther’s difficulty at the embassy was caused not by sheer ambition, but by a certain aloofness with a long social history. Werther is unwilling to take the prescribed route up the governmental ladder, a route that Jerusalem’s family friend Justus Moser was willing to take. He insists, rather, on practically guaranteeing his own disappointment by assuming from the start that he must preserve a critical mass of authority; as high-strung as Jerusalem, he insists on having a world that corresponds with his dreams, which in his case are patterned after the unconditioned world celebrated in the poetry of Haller and Klopstock. Despite its abstractness, the world of poetry was, after all, a German inheritance much more attractive than the political legacy of particularism. Werther trusts words, thinking he can incant his way verbally to the absolutes, and to the ideal community he imagines they offer. Rejecting the most direct, viable, and promising route open to him, employment in the state service, he turns to the least viable: pure verbal incantation, which is demonstrated in probably the most famous scene of the novel, as Lotte, inspired by the storm on June 16, 1771, utters the name “Klopstock!” (28A):

Wir traten an’s Fenster, es donnerte abseitwärts und der herrliche Regen säuselte auf das Land, und der erquikkendste Wohlgeruch stieg in aller Fülle einer warmen Luft zu uns auf. Sie stand auf ihrem Ellenbogen gestützt und ihr Blik durchdrang die gegend, sie sah gen Himmel und auf mich, ich sah ihr Auge thränenvoll, sie legte ihre Hand auf die meinige und sagte—Klopstock!

Ich versank in dem Strome von Empfindungen, den sie in dieser Loosung über mich ausgoß. Ich ertrugs nicht, neigte mich auf ihre Hand und küßte sie unter den wonnevollesten Thränen. Und sah nach ihrem Auge wieder—Edler! hättest du deine Vergötterung in diesem Blikke gesehn, und möcht ich nun deinen so oft entweihten Nahmen nie wieder nennen hören! (28A)

Later in the novel, Lotte will be carried away by Werther’s reading of his translation of Ossian in a manner comparable with that in which the word “Klopstock” causes Werther to sink into a stream of feelings beyond time, beyond the world of temporal succession. It has been argued that such scenes point out that, with the rapid expansion of the eighteenth-century book trade, a healthy community of readers is beginning to develop in Germany—all leading to a literary culture in which even a young country woman without literary schooling can share.²⁷ But as a reader, Lotte is still part of a rather small community; only few must have shared her literary tastes.

What does Werther think he finds when he meets Lotte on May 15? He had said that he was searching for a society: “Ich hab allerley Bekanntschaft gemacht, Gesellschaft hab ich noch keine gefunden” (8A). Can this one person, with whom he relates best when he dreams of unconditioned realms, be the “Gesellschaft” he had been seeking? The real point of the famous June 16 passage just quoted, the point I think Goethe wants to get across, is that there is something precious, hollow, and merely rhetorical about this language of the heart that Werther glorifies, this language in which words are supposed to resonate with perfect accuracy and have a powerful emotional effect. In the letter of June 16 there is a sudden change of tone: Werther appears to have found this “Gesellschaft” he was seeking, yet if this is true, then we must conclude that what he was looking for never was a society in the usual sense. There is something inherently silly and self-indulgent about this scene in which a world unfolds in almost operatic fashion with the utterance of Klopstock’s name. Not only are the feelings Werther and Lotte share in this scene childish; they are indulged in at the expense of society at large. The issue here is less the richness of this experience than its poverty. For all the praise given Klopstock by the Sturm und Drang, the most widely read book of the tradition, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, condemns him as the unacceptable opposite of the here and now and its specific inherited culture. We get a similar view of Klopstock in Schiller’s self-critique of Amalia of Die Räuber, another virtual suicide; there he asserts that Amalia had, in his opinion, “read too much Klopstock.”²⁸ The famous Klopstock scene is there, first and foremost, to show that the limited society it depicts is a dangerous model for human interaction.

In the 1770s, it was the “Göttinger Hain” that heaped the greatest praise on Klopstock. Founded in 1772 by students at the University of Göttingen, and with a focus on poetry, its members included Ludwig Christoph Hölty (1748–76), Friedrich Leopold Stolberg (1750–1819), Heinrich Christian Boie (1744–1806), Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94), Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter (1746–97), and Heinrich Johann Voss (1751–1826). Klopstock, they felt, was a poet of feeling as opposed to abstraction, an opinion shared by Herder in his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1771). Yet I think Blackall sees the true nature of Klopstock’s poetry when he calls it a form of “abstract metonymy”—a literature less concerned with concreteness and metaphor than with abstractions and universales.²⁹ As Blackall suggests, German Empfindsamkeit is different from English Sensibility precisely because of the religious strain provided by writers like Haller and Klopstock³⁰ The language of Albrecht von Haller helped Klopstock create his own elevated, abstract style. Consider a strophe from Haller’s “Über die Ewigkeit” (1736), in which Blackall notes “the strange, evocative power of resounding abstract rhetoric.”³¹

Furchtbares Meer der ernsten Ewigkeit!

Uralter Quell von Welten und von Zeiten!

Unendlichs Grab von Welten und von Zeit!

Beständigs Reich der Gegenwärtigkeit!

Die Asche der Vergangenheit.

Ist dir ein Keim von Künftigkeiten.

Unendlichkeit! wer misset dich?³²

Klopstock continued Haller’s striving after absolutes, deriving haunting—and essentially religious—effects by avoiding the concreteness of his hero Milton while inventing a verbal style that soared to abstract realms. And the style of Klopstock’s whole corpus is at issue here, not just “Frühlingsfeier” (1759), the poem that Lotte and Werther think of at the same time after the storm. In the following four strophes of “Dem Allgegenwärtigen” (1758), an ode Klopstock wrote just a few months before “Frühlingsfeier,” there occur not only formal elements that press toward abstraction, but also several thematic elements present in Werther:

Wenige nur, ach wenige sind,

Deren Aug’ in der Schöpfung

Den Schöpfer sieht! wenige, deren Ohr

Ihn in dem mächtigen Rauschen des Sturmwinds hört,

Im Donner, der rollt, oder im lispelnden Bache,

Unerschafner! dich vernimt,

Weniger Herzen erfüllt, mit Ehrfurcht und Schauer,

Gottes Allgegenwart!

Laß mich im Heiligthume

Dich, Allgegenwärtiger,

Stets suchen, und finden! und ist

Er mir entflohn, dieser Gedanke der Ewigkeit;

Laß mich ihn tiefanbetend

Von den Chören der Seraphim,

Ihn, mit lauten Thränen der Freude,

Herunter rufen!³³

With its abstract language and its themes of exclusivity and the search for eternity, “Dem Allgegenwärtigen,” which also contains a storm, fits as well with the events of the June 16, 1771, letter as “Frühlingsfeier” does. In Werther Klopstock is more than just a “symbol of creativeness” or even of “unproductive inwardness”;³⁴ it was Klopstock who, more than anyone else, demonstrated to Germans how to replace a responsibility to be accountable to others with abstract effusions about eternity: “Klopstock!” refers not just to one poem, or to a spontaneous union of two souls, but to a general threat posed to writers in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that threat is the spaceless and timeless realm that Germans have inherited as part of their culture.

It is hard to read of Werther’s passionate yet impossible love of Lotte, especially the way that Klopstock’s poetry helps reveal it, without thinking of the last great era of German poetry: the Minnesang. The distance separating the age of the courtly lyric and the Sturm und Drang is vast, but the medieval courtly ethos, especially as manifested in the hyperbolic tones of the Minnesang, is in many ways not foreign at all to the German 1770s. In a way quite parallel to Werther, both Guido of Johann Anton Leisewitz’s Julius von Tarent (1776) and Guelfo of Klinger’s Die Zwillinge pursue women (Bianka and Kamilla, respectively) based on models of courtship derived from the medieval love lyric. We think also of Lenz, who in his life and work was a specialist in the idealistic love that operates from a distance and without hope.³⁵ The tradition of the Minnesang, like the Sturm und Drang, dealt in a hyperbolic love which often, as in Neidhart von Reuenthal, was stretched to its limits. German courtly love lyric was somewhat of an aberration in Europe: whereas in French courtly literature the knight fought mainly for honor, lord, and homeland, worldly goals were not available in fragmented Germany. Thus the knight had to settle for the exaggerated praise of courtly women. Like his counterpart in German courtly love poetry, Werther falls in love with a woman who is already answered for. The fact that he cannot have her is a foregone conclusion accepted from the beginning.

Further resonances between Werther and German medieval courtly culture, especially when considered in the context of the contradictory social position of the eighteenth-century bureaucrat, are even more promising as avenues to an understanding of this novel—and the Sturm und Drang in general. Walter Bruford mentions the resemblance between the rise of the educated middle class in the eighteenth century and the rise of another class in the German Middle Ages: the ministerials, a German service class that fashioned itself into a new nobility with a special character of its own.³⁶ A closer look at the ministerials reveals that Bruford indeed pointed out a fascinating connection. The ministerial class, unique to Germany, was a large lower-service nobility that helped Germany on its way to particularism by removing every possibility of a centralized German feudal structure while helping foster attitudes toward authority that bear an uncanny resemblance to those Goethe deals with in Werther. The class originated as German nobles of the ninth and tenth centuries required the services of administrators—messengers, servants, soldiers—to expand. In the thirteenth century, when the first Bürgermeister came on the scene, they were ministerials. And the class also accounts for almost all of the Minnesänger. The French nobility had similar needs and did not see such service as demeaning. But for reasons that are still unclear, Germans saw such service as incompatible with their free status, and it led to the formation of a unique German class, one that took an oath of service, but not homage, to the prince. Like that of the eighteenth-century bureaucrat, the status of the ministerial was ambivalent, suspended somewhere between lordship and service: he was educated, punctilious, and possessed a great sense of self-importance. His bureaucratic zeal, with a basis less in status than in ability, infused German administration with “einen neuen Geist des Rechnens und Kalkulierens, der dem alten Feudaldenken fremd war.”³⁷ Yet as the ministerial found a new scale of accomplishment in administration itself, he also found himself denying allegiance to the very aristocratic class that gave him power. In Germany, the Minnesänger’s homage of his lord’s wife (the basis of his pride) is traceable at least in part to his membership in the ministerial class. For the ministerial, as Arno Borst has argued, harbored deep ambiguity about his social status. He felt a great sense of importance but was not an aristocrat—and this problem found resolution in the Minnesang, which in its highly stylized formal ritual combines acknowledgment of the ministerial’s actual status with his taste for realms above himself. Reinmar von Hagenau’s highly stylized and exaggerated praise of courtly women is a “Produkt der Krise,” Borst argues, that demands and dreams the eternal image of humankind in order to forget a servile past.³⁸ The ministerials devoted themselves to courtly ideology even more intensely than the nobility. Can it be that in courtly poetry, the ministerial class hid from itself its own aggressiveness by adopting the obedient pose of the Minnesänger while simultaneously seizing an opportunity to glorify itself? Perhaps, exactly like so many protagonists of Sturm und Drang who pass judgment on their own civil inheritance, the ministerials chose not to admit that a particular past—one they would like to overcome—had shaped them in ways that they could not avoid.

Historians have found it difficult to make generalizations about the ministerials: understanding a fragmented country like Germany may never be possible except on a regional basis; moreover, no one has been able to pin down any particular eighteenth-century class as the specific descendants of the ministerials. Their influence, more than likely, cuts across classes, and for this reason such parallels as I have been suggesting can only be considered affinities, and certainly not influences. Nevertheless, looking at Werther as if he shared the ministerial posture of mind—with its movement away from rule based on a purely feudal model—leads to interesting results. For one thing, it helps unify those two themes of the novel that critics have traditionally seen as separate, namely, Werther’s love of Lotte and his failed ambitions at the embassy, which even Goethe acknowledged in his 1806 conversation with Napoleon. Yet both themes involve confronting the necessity of culturally specific morality, and thinking of them as related in this way leads to a deeper reason for Sturm und Drang’s reluctance to claim its political past. Werther arrogantly assumes that his impulses should have the status of authority, yet at the same time his devotion to timeless ideals amounts to an abandonment of traditional ties to the past that could give any claim to authority. Seen from this point of view, what could complement Werther’s rejection at court more appropriately than the flight to hyperbole that he makes as he launches back into his impossible courtship of Lotte at the beginning of part 2 of the novel? “Ja, liebe Lotte,” he writes, sounding like a courtly lover in the Minnesang tradition, “ich will alles besorgen und bestellen; geben Sie nur mehr Aufträge, nur recht oft” (46B).

Here, then, is a pattern—almost a ritual—in which the Minnesänger, the ministerial, and Werther, take part, one where the servile figure humbly asks for tasks to perform, yet continually declares his aloofness from all authority. On June 29, 1771, Werther calls the doctor a “dogmatische Dratpuppe” (32A). The envoy’s way of conducting business is “lächerlich” (79A). The wife of the new parson is “Eine Frazze, die sich abgiebt gelehrt zu sein” (98A). The unnamed figure who interrupts him on July 29, 1772, while he writes to Lotte is “unerträglich” (91A). He considers Albert’s love for Lotte shallow compared to his own: “Weiß er sie zu achten wie sie es verdient?” (118B). For Albert has a “Mangel an Fühlbarkeit” (91A). Aren’t the aristocrats who call him “übermütig” after he stays on at dinner with Graf von C. quite correct? Critics have always praised Werther for his warmth and sensitivity: in the 1790s, Wilhelm von Humboldt spoke of the harmless pleasures of his “hohe, feine Sentimentalität”;³⁹ and in our own century, Herbert Schöffler wrote: “Werther geht zugrunde an den besten Kräften seines Wesens, an allem, was gut ist in ihm, daß er liebevoll und treu ist,” adding that Werther is “die erste Tragödie ohne Schuld, ohne Prinzip des Bösen.”⁴⁰ On the surface, it is easy to see Werther as a sensitive, unspoiled, visionary man.⁴¹ But there is also a cold side to him, and it comes out in his refusal to come to face the culture he has inherited. Very unlike the sympathetic heroes recommended by Lessing, Werther values principles that are not only foreign to his social and political milieu; they are unreliable as universal rules. He is more willing to be guided by personal moral legislation than by a sense of accountability to a community. Typical is his ridiculous attempt to defend the Peasant Boy despite all the evidence marshaled against him.⁴² Werther, as Blackall suggests, is about constructing an artificial order, but more specifically it is about an ordering that rushes in too quickly and too arrogantly—a state of affairs unacceptable to a Goethe who is already rejecting his own youthful Schwärmerei.

Of course, Werther also has moments in which he sees that his intentions, in and of themselves, can never make the world move according to his will: “Ich habe mich so oft auf den Boden geworfen und Gott um Thränen gebeten, wie ein Akkersmann um Regen, wenn der Himmel ehern über ihm ist, und um ihn die Erde verdürstet. Aber, ach ich fühls! Gott giebt Regen und Sonnenschein nicht unserm ungestümen Bitten …” (104A). Such scenes insure that the greatest sense in which Werther is a revolutionary novel is not in its depiction of the free spirit of Werther, but in its attempt to penetrate to the moral center of its audience by drawing the reader’s attention to precisely what Werther lacks. In the 1770s, it seems, Germany was in a position to treat feelings about self-governance in a less practical and entirely different way than they were treated in the rest of Europe. Each in his own way, writers of Sturm und Drang addressed the problem of this arrogance that defies Germany’s cultural inheritance from within. It is as if, in his first novel, Goethe implies that a satisfying German society is beyond the reach of mere intentions: Werther delivers a strict verdict on a “cold” aspect of German Empfindsamkeit that occurs when a “liberated” modern emotional life denies its accountability to the rest of the world. As Werther attempts to conduct his life according to his private sense of logic and completeness, we see intentions misfire, and as the book draws to a close, Werther’s botched suicide (he suffers twelve hours before dying) reminds us one last time how easily intentions can go astray. In the episode of the Peasant Boy, Werther lays great stress on the fact that the boy’s intentions were always pure, “daß seine Absichten gegen sie [his victim] immer redlich gewesen” (94B), yet as Goethe seems to know, intentions easily go astray when they are without a culture to give them a foundation. When the judge proclaims that the Peasant Boy is doomed, Albert takes up a position of authority as never before and commands Lotte to see to it that Werther visits less often.

Nevertheless, there is still one possible line of defense against the charge of arrogance I have leveled at Werther: that Werther is a helpless victim of Albert and Lotte, who help him commit suicide by encouraging his affection for Lotte and even lending him the pistol. It is, in fact, easy to arrive at this conclusion when reading the 1787 edition, which is the standard edition of the book and still the only version available in English. But the 1787 edition differs significantly from the original 1774 version, for in 1787 Goethe downplays the cold side of Werther. In the 1774 edition, Lotte allows herself to be flattered by Werther, encourages him to visit, enjoys his attention, and is willing to use his vision as a means to escape from her parochial surroundings. As Erika Nolan has pointed out, Albert, who is flattered by Werther’s attention to his fiancée, clearly encourages him to get to know Lotte better.⁴³ He allows her to visit and even makes a birthday gift of the ribbon she wore when Werther and she met. Lotte takes frequent walks with Werther, gives him tasks to perform, and shares responsibility for putting the suicide weapon in his hands. Especially in the 1787 version it is clear that Goethe meant Albert and Lotte to be partly conscious of the implications of their actions. After the suicide, Lotte and Albert silently blame each other for tempting Werther into a hopeless situation, yet neither can admit to the other that they played a part in Werther’s death. The 1787 additions also include the long section on Lotte’s unwillingness to share Werther with her girlfriends (135B) and the letter of September 12, 1772, concerning the canary that Albert brought back from his trip: “Einen neuen Freund, sagte sie und lockte ihn auf ihre Hand, er ist meinen Kleinen zugedacht. Er thut gar zu lieb! Sehen Sie ihn! Wenn ich ihm Brod gebe flattert er mit den Flügeln und pickt so artig. Er küßt mich auch, sehen Sie!” (97B). Coquettishly, Lotte kisses the canary, then has the canary kiss Werther. “Er ißt mir auch aus dem Munde, sagte sie” (97B). Werther’s reaction: “Sie sollte es nicht thun!” (97B). It was especially this scene, from the 1787 edition, that evoked Thomas Mann’s comment that Lotte displayed “in Unschuld gehüllte Koketterie.”⁴⁴

Reading Werther as a text of the Sturm und Drang requires that we deemphasize the 1778 version, which has become standard, and return to the early editions of 1774 and 1775. And there it is Werther, not Lotte or Albert, who must take most of the responsibility for the suicide. His manipulative powers over Lotte are so great that he not only enlists her help; he imbues her with guilt. Think, for instance, of his last letter: “Weyhnachtsabend hältst Du dieses Papier in Deiner Hand, zitterst und benezt es mit Deinen lieben Thränen” (134A). Werther obviously wants Lotte to view his suicide as an altruistic, well-intentioned act committed for the sake of another: “Es ist nicht Verzweiflung, es ist Gewißheit, daß ich ausgetragen habe, und daß ich mich opfere für Dich, ja Lotte, warum sollt ich’s verschweigen: eins von uns dreyen muß hinweg, und das will ich seyn” (132A). When Werther writes such lines as “Sie sieht nicht, sie fühlt nicht, daß sie einen Gift bereitet, der mich und sie zu Grunde richten wird” (106A), it is easy to take the assertion at face value and sympathize with him. Yet Werther is anything but a magnanimous soul with good intentions.

He is a cold engineer of relationships who, during the Ossian reading, when he claims to ask for her forgiveness for losing control of himself, seems more interested in shifting the blame for his suicidal course on her: “O vergieb mir! vergieb mir! Gestern! Es hätte der lezte Augenblik meines Lebens seyn sollen” (147A). Generally we think of the sensibility depicted in Werther as part of the secularization of a new inwardness stemming from the Reformation. But how can this cold, stoical aspect of Werther fit into that tradition? One way to approach this problem is to recognize that the Reformation’s emphasis on the inward route to the absolute brings with it a focus on inner consistency. As Ernst Troeltsch points out, Lutheranism involved trading sacramental grace for free grace, and making the problem of Christianity not how the institution of the church guarantees salvation but, rather, how one can gain personal assurance.⁴⁵ In classic Lutheranism, Troeltsch suggests, Christian individualism quickly becomes purely subjective, with no legal claim on either society or the church: “so ist der christliche Individualismus des Luthertums rein in die Tiefen der Gesinnung versenkt, ohne rechtlichen Anspruch an die Gesellschaft und an die Kirche, ohne Fähigkeit der äußeren Geltendmachung und im Grunde wesentlich und begrifflich ohne Gemeinschaftsbedürfnis überhaupt, indem er nur aus Liebe sich unter die Bedingungen des Gemeinschaftslebens beugt.”⁴⁶ Max Weber would go even further, arguing that the inwardness of Reformation thought promotes a quite unexpected impulse, one we do not normally associate with Preromanticism: methodical conduct.

Das “methodische” Leben: die rationale Form der Askese, wird dadurch aus dem Kloster in die Welt übertragen. Die asketischen Mittel sind im Prinzip die gleichen: Ablehnung aller eitlen Selbst- oder anderen Kreaturvergötterung, der feudalen Hoffart, des unbefangenen Kunst- und Lebensgenusses, der “Leichtfertigkeit” und aller müßigen Geldund Zeitvergeudung, der Pflege der Erotik oder irgendwelcher von der rationalen Orientiertheit auf Gottes Willen und Ruhm, und das heißt: auf die rationale Arbeit im privaten Beruf und in den gottverordneten sozialen Gemeinschaften, ablenkenden Beschäftigung. Die Beschneidung alles feudalen ostensiblen Prunkes und alles irrationalen Konsums überhaupt wirkt in der Richtung der Kapitalaufspeicherung und der immer erneuten Verwertung des Besitzes in werbender Form, die “innerweltliche Askese” in ihrer Gesamtheit aber in der Richtung der Züchtung und Glorifizierung des “Berufsmenschentums,” wie es der Kapitalismus (und die Bürokratie) braucht. Die Lebensinhalte überhaupt werden nicht auf Personen, sondern auf “sachliche” rationale Zwecke ausgerichtet, die Caritas selbst ein sachlicher Armenpflegebetrieb zur Mehrung des Ruhmes Gottes.⁴⁷

According to Weber, ascetic Protestantism takes the intense control and regulation of personal life that was once expected only of the monk and generalizes it. Thus life becomes focused not on persons, but on impersonal, rational goals, and is governed by a relatively rational ethics. Virtue is no longer defined by the feelings one has based on a body of inherited traditions, but according to the completeness and correctness of one’s own thinking. No longer accountable to God or to one’s fellow human beings, individuals conduct themselves according to internal criteria.⁴⁸

If Troeltsch and Weber are correct, and if Protestantism is itself a source of methodical conduct, then understanding Preromantic currents of Enlightenment may require that we recognize a drive for the rational and the correct within at least some versions of Empfindsamkeit. Werther’s conduct, despite all outward appearances of sensitivity and magnanimity, indicates that he may even sense his own harrowing rationality. When he shudders at his own marionette-like actions at the embassy (“Wie ausgetroknet meine Sinnen werden … [ich] fasse manchmal meinen Nachbar an der hölzernen Hand und schaudere zurük,” 77A) it points up a fact that critics of this novel generally avoid: that the embassy and Werther have a great deal in common. Like Albert, but on a less conscious level, Werther operates on a closed and inflexible set of principles. As this novel demonstrates, it is possible to qualify as a lovable, even charismatic Schwärmer—as a high-spirited personality who pulls others into his orbit—while embracing an impersonal relation to others. The cold side of Empfindsamkeit I have described, an obverse aspect of early Romantic inwardness, is at the center of this book, which laments that the mind is inadvertently becoming a bureaucratically organized structure in the eighteenth century, a structure designed to carry out personal plans while looking away from the broader implications of its own decisions. Perhaps understandably, it would be Germans, with their bureaucratic heritage reaching into the late Middle Ages, who would write more eloquently than other Europeans of the horrors of the rational and bureaucratic way of life: Lenz would conceive of eighteenth-century life as one in which, as Lenz put it, “wir drehen uns eine Zeitlang in diesem Platz herum wie die andern Räder.”⁴⁹ Schiller’s Karl Moor would call his age a “schlappes Kastratenjahrhundert.”⁵⁰ And, fittingly, Werther’s body will be carried to the cemetery by “Handwerker” (157A).

Opposing a sensitive and inspiring Werther to the bureaucratically organized thought of Albert and the Ambassador greatly oversimplifies this novel. For Werther is not who he appears to be on the surface. The calm logic of his last few hours shows that his suicide stems not from excessive emotionalism per se but from overorganization. Ignace Feuerlicht observes: “Werther has never been more disciplined and logical than on the day before his death.”⁵¹ Having decided to kill himself, he seems to be in perfect harmony with himself and is able to perform the seemingly impossible feat of climbing the rocky hill in the dark. Before shooting himself he calmly sits down to bread and wine and declares: “Alles ist so still um mich her, und so ruhig meine Seele, ich danke dir Gott, der du diesen lezten Augenblikken diese Wärme, diese Kraft schenkest” (154A). Goethe’s first novel, with its arrogant protagonist, is not a warning against emotionalism per se; it is a warning that Empfindsamkeit is becoming infiltrated with reason.⁵²

As for the issue of inheritance with which I began this consideration of Werther, Goethe positions such matters so that they effectively refute Werther’s preference for the unconditioned over the conditioned: his notion that Lotte would be happier with him than with Albert is immediately followed by the letter of August 4, 1772, where we learn that Hans, the child referred to on May 27, 1771, has died and that his father has returned from Switzerland without his inheritance (91A). Werther’s hyperbolic praise of Lotte and Ossian on July 10, 1771, is immediately followed on July 11 by another death, this time of Frau M., who is herself concerned with the budget deficit that her successor will inherit (41A-42A). Goethe wants us to see Werther’s flight from German specificity as an avoidance of the complications involved in committing oneself to the past. It is not a utopia that Werther finds among the common people, as some have argued.⁵³ The utopia exists only in Werther’s mind: he ignores the conflicts and disagreements that are part of every community, and precisely the most unnatural and artificial scenes of the novel are those in which Werther tries to depict the life of the common people as harmonious. For him, Lotte means refuge from dealing with precisely these sorts of struggles in society, and the sanctuary she represents is suggested as he takes refuge from a storm on January 20, 1772, and says: “Ach muß ich Ihnen schreiben, liebe Lotte, hier in der Stube einer geringen Bauernherberge, in die ich mich vor einem schweren Wetter geflüchtet habe” (77A), then goes on to tell her that he is working with people who are entirely alien to his heart.

The only people who do not seem alien to Werther’s heart are those whose lives are largely unspecific to any particular culture, like the heroes of Ossian, who Werther thinks derive their greatness merely from being themselves. Werther could have chosen the positive, culture-bound, compassionate features of the ancient society Macpherson depicts in Ossian, the side that leads to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. But instead he culls out its self-thwarting, suicidal aspect. What Count von C. tells Werther on December 24, 1771, after Werther had been working at the legal office for two months, is quite relevant to Werther’s problem: “Die Leute erschweren sich’s und andern. Doch sagt er, man muß sich darein resigniren, wie ein Reisender, der über einen Berg muß. Freylich! wär der Berg nicht da, wäre der Weg viel bequemer und kürzer, er ist nun aber da! und es soll drüber!—” (73A). Still, Werther will not accept the fact that human interaction naturally involves a given state of affairs that one simply has to work with, like the inheritance issue that opens the novel. Werther obviously discussed the matter only superficially with his aunt, and then avoids taking care of the problem. He consistently glosses over such problems, acting as if they are not there: after Hans’s mother relates to Werther her anguish over the inheritance out of which she claimed her relatives wanted to cheat her husband, Werther remarks, inexplicably, that the sight of the woman calmed his soul: “so linderts all den Tumult, der Anblik eines solchen Geschöpfs,” for she lives “von einem Tag zum andern” and “die Blätter abfallen sieht, und nichts dabey denkt, als daß der Winter kömmt” (15A). His impatience with what he perceives as an unworkable eighteenth-century Germany leads him to sleepwalk through the demands of the here and now and to find value only in the unconditioned realm of an impossible love. And this attitude, as I hope I have shown, gives him more in common with the rational life he despises than even he suspects. Yet Werther presents just one way that Sturm und Drang tried to resolve Germany’s parochial circumstances in a seemingly innocent way. The texts to which we now turn will try to excuse the explosive frustration born of the German past by blaming it on circumstances beyond the protagonist’s control.