The Cambridge History of German Literature

One of the first literary celebrities was Goethe, who burst on to the European scene at the age of 25 with his novel The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774). Werthermania ensued, but according to Nicholas Saul, Senior Lecturer in German and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, it was based on a misunderstanding. In turning from his stultifying, bourgeois surroundings to the more poetic alternative he finds in works of literature that the hero “misuses literature wilfully to transform reality into whatever fantasy happens to suit his fundamentally escapist subjectivism, whilst changing nothing”. This figure of protest is middle‐class to the...