The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · first published 1774
The book that started a fashion, a panic, and a moral argument that has never quite finished.
15 versions · 1792–2024 · screen, stage
Goethe’s short novel of 1774 made him famous across Europe and is credited with a wave of imitative suicides — the first modern instance of a book being blamed for what its readers did. Young men dressed as Werther. Some cities banned it.
Adaptations run from 1938 to 2024, most recently as comedy, which is a legitimate reading: the novel is written entirely in the letters of a young man with no sense of proportion whatsoever.
Written in six weeks, 1774
Goethe was twenty-four and had just come away from a hopeless attachment to a woman engaged to someone else; a friend of his had shot himself over a similar situation. He wrote the book in a few weeks and it went across Europe like weather.
The response was unlike anything publishing had seen. Young men dressed in Werther’s blue coat and yellow waistcoat. There were Werther teacups. And there were suicides — enough of them, and enough of them found with the book, that several cities banned it. It is the first time in the modern record that a book was blamed for what its readers went and did.
Goethe lived another fifty-eight years and spent much of them being asked about it.
On screen
9Film and television, earliest first.
- 1938 The Novel of Werther Max Ophüls
- 1949 Encounter with Werther Karl-Heinz Stroux
- 1976 The Sorrows of Young Werther Egon Günther
- 1986 Werther Pilar Mercedes Miró Romero
- 1990 Werther Håkan Alexandersson
- 1993 Young Werther Jacques Doillon
- 2008 Werther Uwe Janson
- 2010 Young Goethe in Love Philipp Stölzl
- 2024 Young Werther José Lourenço
On stage
6Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.
- 1792 Charlotte et Werther Rodolphe Kreutzer
- 1796 Werther Gaetano Pugnani
- 1802 Werter e Carlotta Vincenzo Pucitta
- 1903 Werther Reynaldo Hahn
- — Werther Jules Massenet
- — Carlotta e Werther Carlo Coccia
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.