J. W. Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther

The central motif of this two-part love novel in letters (combined with a novel-journal) is the tragic shipwreck of a gifted and sensitive young man. This lies both in his love for Lotte, his fiancée and later wife of his friend Albert Kestner, and in his efforts to achieve self-fulfilment in employment and social life. The rich inner world of the hero (a Rousseauian admirer of nature, a worshipper of Homer, a sensitive and impetuous nature) seems to concentrate the feeling of the world-boom sweeping Europe at the end of the 18th century. The subtle depiction of states of mind, to which the fiction used by the publisher gave the appearance of complete authenticity, brought a new quality to German literature that was literally a revolutionary intervention in the literary tradition, even in terms of language.