The Artist's Escape from the Idyll: The Relation of Werther to Sesenheim

ELIZABETH POWERS The Artist's Escape from the Idyll: The Relation of Werther to Sesenheim ERDMANN WANIEK'S INSIGHTFUL STUDY of Werther as a reader and of the readers oÃ- Die Leiden des jungen Werthers contains a statement that, while delineating contemporary misreadings of the novel, throws light on a transition that was occurring in eighteenthcentury aesthetics: "Werther ist kein Tugendabriß, sondern ein Mensch mit all seinen schwer faßbaren Widersprüchen." 1TlUs Statement deserves some attention for, despite the tendency of Goethe's contemporaries to identify with (or indeed to emulate) him,Werther is a literary character, not a human being ("Mensch").That the novel Werther had made this distinction problematic is sounded in Matthias Claudius's assessment of the novel—"Weiß nicht, ob's Geschieht oder 'η Gedicht ist . . ."2 Our present tendency as critics to speak of figures in novels as if they were "real" human beings (e.g., Werther as a melancholic), which has by now become fairly naturalized, shows how complete is this transition. The change in eighteenth-century aesthetics—from the separation of the realms of art and life to a conflation of the two—is accompanied by a closely related contemporary reaction to Werther, namely, to detect in the fiction the decisive influence of the poet's life. Kestner, for instance, writing to August von Hennings, mentioned similarities between the people in Wetzlar and the characters in Wahlheim—"In Lotte und Albert hat er von uns, meiner Frau und mir, Züge entlehnt" (HA 6:527)—and many details of his account of Jerusalem's suicide, in a November 1772 letter to Goethe, were taken over literally in the description of Werther's suicide. Yet, the matter of Goethe's relationship to Werther is felt to go deeper than such superficial borrowings of events and local color. It was assumed, for instance, that Goethe's relationship with Lotte Buff reflected Werther's with "his" Lotte and that Goethe's feelings and mental state mirrored his hero's, an assumption nicely summed up in the reac- 48 Elizabeth Powers tion of Moses Mendelssohn: "Ach, ich verstehe; Goethe fand es poetisch schön, sich zu erschießen, und zog es vor, in richtiger Person am Leben zu bleiben!"3 Goethe's own comments have strengthened the commonplace that he endowed Werther with his own motivations. In 1779, for instance, he wrote to Charlotte von Stein about suggestions that had been made that he write another Werther: "Gott möge mich behüten, daß ich nicht wieder in den Fall komme, einen zu schreiben und schreiben zu können" (HA 6:534). As late as 1812, Goethe used a phrase in a letter to Karl Friedrich Zelter (3 December), in response to the suicide of the latter's step-son, that he also used to describe the genesis of Werther in that portion of Dichtung und Wahrheit on which he was then working: Wenn das taedium vitae den Menschen ergreift, so ist er nur zu bedauern, nicht zu schelten. Daß alle Symptome dieser wunderlichen, so natürlichen als unnatürlichen Krankheit auch einmal mein Innerstes durchrast haben, daran läßt "Werther" wohl niemand zweifeln. This affective view of the source of Goethe's creativity is at the basis of Barker Fairley's writings on Goethe: Readers of Goethe are agreed that his works are deeply involved in his experience.The translation of life into literature, observable in varying degrees in other writers, is in his case so immediate, so habitual, and so complex as almost to place him in a class apart. He,more than any,is the empirical poet who must go through things in person before he can find in himself the means of expressing them.4 Fairley is articulating what has become a deeply entrenched modern critical assumption: that poetry is "personal utterance" and that "the poet must base his fictions on personal experience," as Marjorie G. Perloff has expressed the matter in her essay "Yeats and Goethe."5 These views resonate with countless interpretations of Goethe's work that see it as a decisive break with the earlier poetic practice of imitating models—indeed, almost as a transformation in human nature.6 So...