Chapter 1 - Werther in context

Summary

(a) Territories and nationhood

Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which first appeared in 1774 (to be followed by a second version in 1787), was an immediate success: not only was it a bestseller in Germany, in the space of a few years it captured the imagination of European readers as well. One of the aims of this study is to explain why and how Werther had this colossal impact. The international success it achieved becomes all the more remarkable when we remember that it emerged from a country that was different in kind from the other European nations. The particularity (in a variety of senses) of Germany has been – and still is – an issue within European historiography.

Historians employ a number of terms to characterize the course of German history prior to 1871. Notions such as ‘der deutsche Sonderweg’ (the special course of Germany) or ‘die verspätete Nation’ (the belated nation) recur constantly. They express the idea that the German lands constituted an exception to the (European) historical norm in that Germany only became a unified nation state three decades from the end of the nineteenth century. Before then ‘Germany’ existed only as a cultural entity defined by a shared language, and not as a political unit. The Holy Roman Empire administered a complex system of rights and privileges which provided a loose administrative and judicial framework within which a profusion of large and small territories could operate (rather than cooperate).