Werther, the Undead

Abstract

HANS RUDOLF VAGET Werther, the Undead 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."1 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,2 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. In one of his essays on Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Tom Saine has drawn attention to the often overlooked characterization of Werther's suicide as a vicious and basically selfish act that destroys the lives of the two other participants in that fateful triangle: "While he does not turn a gun on Albert and Lotte, he still manages to murder them—in a moral sense—as well as himself."3 Vicious or not, we certainly have here a suicide that is carefully staged and designed, as Saine has convincingly shown, to inflict maximum pain on Lotte and on Albert. But Goethe also designed it with a view towards maximum effect on his contemporaries. Like any ambitious young author he desired to capture the imagination of his readers, conquer it, and mold it in the image of his literary substitute. Given the lethal outcome of the book, this undertaking was fraught with incalculable ethical risks. Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 18 Hans Rudolf Vaget Consider how carefully Werther prepares his deed. Under the pretext of an impending journey, he borrows the very instruments of his suicide, a pair of pistols, from Albert. Knowing that he, like all suicides, will be barred from being buried in the common cemetery, he chooses in advance the spot where he wishes to be laid to rest. He arranges for a last, emotional meeting with Lotte in order to wrest from her a sign of her love so that he can die with the sweet knowledge that his love is reciprocated. He chooses Christmas Eve, of all days, as the day of his departure. Before killing himself, he dresses in his characteristic, dandylike outfit: a blue coat over a yellow vest and yellow breeches. And in a particularly memorable yet puzzling gesture, he leaves on the lecturn in his room a copy of lxssing's Emilia Galotti. Further heightening the emotional effect of Werther 's suicide, and underlining the larger sense of finality, Goethe famously ends his novel with a few laconic and chilling sentences: "Um zwölfe Mittags starb er. Die Gegenwart des Amtmanns und seine Anstalten tischten [vertuschten] einen Auflauf. Nachts gegen eilfe ließ er ihn an der Stätte begraben, die er sich erwählt hatte, der Alte folgte der Leiche und die Söhne. Albert vermochte nicht. Man fürchtete für Lottens Leben. Handwerker trugen ihn. Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet" (FA 1.8:266). Werther's suicide did indeed conquer the imagination of Goethe's contemporaries. The book became a sensational success and the inarguable foundational...