Ordinary lovers, in a century that still ranked people strictly

A Korean midterm essay on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, begins with a claim about who is allowed to stand at the center of a love story. Earlier tales, the writer says, usually gave that place to a god, a royal, or a noble. Werther is a young man of the civic class. Lotte, too, is an ordinary woman, already caring for eight younger siblings. To put their love at the center, in late eighteenth-century Germany, with its strict ranks and its trust in reason, is treated as a new kind of attempt.

Goethe, the essay says, gives these two people dignity and the urgency of love. They are not kept as minor figures around a court. A sentence the writer holds onto is that anyone might want to love as Werther loves, and to be loved as Lotte is loved. In that sense the story became a pattern for later modern love stories, as the course textbook had also said.

Albert’s return, a debate about suicide, a book and a ribbon

Werther, in the essay’s account, keeps seeing Lotte even after he knows she is promised to someone else. When Albert, her fiancé, returns, Werther’s pain deepens. He still chooses, for Lotte’s sake, to remain on friendly terms with Albert. A sharp argument about suicide then opens a further wound. A book and a ribbon that Lotte gives him for his birthday are taken as a sign of love, and Werther, the writer says, begins to lose his hold on rational control.

The essay does not turn those gifts into a detective’s proof. It treats them as objects that, for Werther, confirm a bond he can no longer keep in proportion.

Civic pride, and a tragic choice for feeling

The writer also finds a kind of tension that is not only romantic. Werther does not meet aristocratic society mainly with a sense of inferiority. He appears, instead, as a man with pride in himself as a human being. Goethe, the essay suggests, is using him to show the inward growth and the wish for freedom of the civic class. That is part of why the writer can still feel close to Werther’s love now, in a life that still has to hold love, feeling, and a hard everyday world at once.

Werther’s final choice to stand on the side of feeling is called a tragedy, and it is not tidied away. The essay leaves him there, as a person who would not give the last word to restraint alone. A longer Korean version of this account is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student midterm essay on Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, read through Lotte, Albert, and a love story about ordinary civic people.

Last updated 15 November 2026