Symptomatic Readers and the Sentimental Novel

ABSTRACT

Fears around the consequences of reading went hand in hand with the development of the novel in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and these concerns crystallized around the reception of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). An examination of prescriptive approaches to reading and an analysis of how moral fears around aesthetic attachment were transferred from theatrical experience to reading prepare the ground for looking at fictional accounts of reading practices in Wertheriaden — the innumerable texts that reused characters and topoi from Goethe’s novel. Where Leopold Alois Hoffmann’s play Das Wertherfieber (1785) offers a broad condemnation of the fashion for Werther, Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen’s identically titled satirical novel, Das Werther-Fieber (1776) ostensibly condemns the moral arguments for suicide in Werther, but its comic portrayal of a variety of social reading practices points to a more nuanced phenomenology of reading — and how reading cannot be contained.

KEYWORDS:

• Werther
• reading
• aesthetic attachment
• German literature
• eighteenth century

Notes

1 Johann Georg Heinzmann, Appel an meine Nation über Aufklärung und Aufklärer; über Gelehrsamkeit und Schriftsteller; über Büchermanufakturisten, Rezensenten, Buchhändler; über moderne Philosophen und Menschenerzieher; auch über mancherley anderes, was Menschenfreyheit und Menschenrechte betrifft. Über die Pest der deutschen Literatur (Berne: [Auf Kosten des Verfassers], 1795), p. 451.

2 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Gespräch über die Poesie’, in Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler and others, 31 vols (Munich: Schöningh, 1958–) i/2: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I, ed. by Hans Eichner (1967), pp. 284–362 (p. 332).

3 Schlegel, ‘Gespräch’, p. 332.

4 Johann Adam Bergk, Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen: Nebst Bemerkungen über Schriften und Schriftsteller (Jena: Hempel, 1799), p. 9.

5 For overviews of the reception history of Werther, see: Klaus R. Scherpe, Werther und Wertherwirkung: Zum Syndrom bürgerlicher Gesellschaftsordnung im 18. Jahrhundert (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1970); Horst Flaschka, Goethes ‘Werther’: Werkkontextuelle Deskription und Analyse (Munich: Fink, 1987), pp. 239–98.

6 Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Goethe (Baltimore, MA: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998); pp. 147–79; Matt Erlin, Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 12–13.

7 See Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

8 Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’, Deutsche Chronik, 72. Stück, 5 December 1774, p. 574.

9 Katrin Kohl, ‘Metaphorik des Schreibens und Lesens um 1770’, in Gefühlskultur in der bürgerlichen Aufklärung, ed. by Achim Aurnhammer and others (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), pp. 23–46 (pp. 41–42).

10 Abigail Williams, Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), p. 13.

11 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 5.

12 Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974); Anselm Haverkamp, ‘Illusion und Empathie: Die Struktur der “teilnehmenden Lektüre” in den Leiden Werthers’, in Erzählungforschung: Ein Symposion, ed. by Eberhard Lämmert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), pp. 243–68.

13 For an expansive account of the Wertheriaden, see Ingrid Engel, Werther und die Wertheriaden: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte (St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1986).

14 Luisa Banki and Kathrin Wittler, ‘Historische Praktiken der Lektüre in geschlechtertheoretischer Perspektive: Zur Einführung’, in Lektüre und Geschlecht im 18. Jahrhundert: Zur Situativität des Lesens zwischen Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit, ed. by Luisa Banki and Kathrin Wittler (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020), pp. 7–27 (pp. 12–13).

15 Bergk, p. 68.

16 Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 41–78.

17 On the reading debates, see Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe 1770–1910 (Munich: dtv, 1977), pp. 57–66.

18 As Sara Ahmed notes, there is an etymological link — particularly relevant for Werther — between passion, passivity, and suffering: Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 2–3.

19 Johann Melchior Goeze, Theologische Untersuchung der Sittlichkeit der heutigen deutschen Schaubühne überhaupt (Hamburg: Brandt, 1770), p. 108. See also Ruedi Graf, Das Theater im Literaturstaat: Literarisches Theater auf dem Weg zur Bildungsmacht, Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 117 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), pp. 313–16.

20 Fayçal Falaky, ‘Rousseau’s Theatrical Reform: “l’utile et l’agréable” in the Lettre à d’Alembert and Julie’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 47.3 (2011), 262–74.

21 Wolfgang Riedel, Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller: Zur Ideengeschichte der medizinischen Schriften und der ‘Philosophischen Briefe’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1985), pp. 100–51.

22 As Jean I. Marsden has demonstrated in her study of affect and performance on the eighteenth-century British stage: Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 42.

23 This comes close to David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s understanding of sympathy as being based on the sharing of emotions: see Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 11–13. Schiller’s debt to Scottish Enlightenment thinkers during his time at the Karlsschule is well-known: see Jeffrey L. High, ‘Writings from Schiller’s Time at the Karlsschule in Stuttgart (1773–1780)’, in The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, ed. by Antonino Falduto and Tim Mehigan (Cham: Springer International Publishing; Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), pp. 91–128 (p. 98).

24 On the longstanding association of mens sana in corpore sano in theories of reading, see Adrian Johns, The Science of Reading: Information, Media & Mind in Modern America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), pp. 14–18.

25 Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps towards a History of Reading’, in his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 155–87 (p. 157).

26 Andew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 12–13; see also Seán M. Williams, Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019), p. 29.

27 Howard Gaskill, ‘“Ossian hat in meinem Herzen den Humor verdrängt”: Goethe and Ossian Reconsidered’, in Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for his 250th Anniversary, ed. by Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), pp. 47–59 (p. 59).

28 Andreas Blödorn, ‘Lektüre als Fieberanfall — Empathie als Modell der (An-)Spannung: Mit einer neu gefassten “Diagnose” des Leiden des jungen Werthers’, in Zwischen Text und Leser: Studien zu Begriff, Geschichte und Funktion literarischer Spannung, ed. by Ingo Irsigler, Christoph Jürgensen, and Daniela Langer (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2008), pp. 165–88.

29 For lyrical derivatives of Werther, see Karin Vorderstemann, ‘Ausgelitten hast du — ausgerungen … ’: Lyrische Wertheriaden im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007).

30 A poetics of inoculation, purged of affect, would later inform Goethe’s classicism: see Cornelia Zumbusch, Die Immunität der Klassik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), pp. 240–55.

31 Matthew Birkhold, Characters before Copyright: The Rise and Regulation of Fan Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 4–5.

32 Marc Lacheny, Littérature ‘d’en haut’, littérature ‘d’en bas’? La Dramaturgie canonique allemande et le théâtre populaire viennois de Stranitzky à Nestroy, Forum: Österreich 2 (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016), pp. 122–25. On the lack of traction of Sturm und Drang drama in Vienna, see Johann Sonnleitner, ‘Kein Sturm und Drang in Wien: Anmerkungen zu einer kulturellen Differenz’, Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge, 15 (2006), 1–13.

33 Caryl Clark, ‘Reading and Listening: Viennese Frauenzimmer Journals and the Sociocultural Context of Mozartean Opera Buffa’, The Music Quarterly, 87.1 (Spring 2004), 140–75 (pp. 160–61).

34 Norbert Bachleitner, Censorship of Literature in Austria, 1751–1848 (Leiden: Brill, 2022), p. 57.

35 Leopold Alois Hoffmann, Das Wertherfieber: Ein Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen (Vienna: Hartmann, 1785), p. 120.

36 Martin Andree, Wenn Texte töten: Über Werther, Medienwirkung und Mediengewalt (Munich: Fink, 2006), pp. 12–14.

37 On Anton Reiser and reading, see also Robert S. Bledsoe, ‘Empathetic Reading and Identity Formation’, LYb, 33 (2001), 201–32 (pp. 204–05).

38 See Elliott Schreiber, The Topography of Modernity: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Space of Autonomy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 20–23.

39 Karl Philipp Moritz, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische und kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. by Anneliese Klingenberg and others, 7 vols (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005–), i: Anton Reiser. Teil I: Text, ed. by Christof Wingertszahn (2006), p. 251.

40 This reproduced the first edition of 1774 and was published by Walthard in Berne, based on a drawing from Balthasar Anton Dunker.

41 See Andree, p. 15.

42 On the importance of Don Quixote as a model for self-referential and -reflexive novels in the eighteenth century, see Alexander Honold, ‘Quijote im Wunderland: Wielands Don Sylvio als literarisches Sozialisationsmodell’, in Wieland/Übersetzen: Sprachen, Gattungen, Räume, ed. by Bettine Menke and Wolfgang Struck (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 179–205 (p. 181).

43 David E. Wellbery, ‘1774, January – March: Pathologies of Literature’, in A New History of German Literature, ed. by David E. Wellbery and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), pp. 386–93 (p. 392); Dorothee Birke, Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 15–16.

44 Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen, Das Werther-Fieber: Ein unvollendetes Familienstück (Nieder-Teutschland [Leipzig: Weidmann], 1776) pp. 26–27.

45 Jan Borkowski, Die Applikation literarischer Texte: Studien zur Erstrezeption vielgelesener Romane in der Aufklärung, Moderne und Gegenwart, Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, 154 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 77–85.

46 Merve Emre, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 11. For Emre, ‘paraliterary’ refers to reading practices beyond the academy, which might be pejoratively described as uncritical.

47 Göchhausen, pp. 43–44.

48 See Flaschka, p. 247.

49 Flaschka, pp. 162–67, 193–98.

50 As feared in reading debates towards the end of the eighteenth century: see Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, 2nd edn (Munich: Fink, 1987), pp. 136–50.

51 Göchhausen, p. 190.

52 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 2–5; William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 12.

53 Göchhausen, pp. 92–93, 100.

54 On this widespread practice of literary sociability, see Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2000), pp. 35–36.

55 Jan Erik Antonsen, Text-Inseln: Studien zum Motto in der deutschen Literatur vom 17. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), p. 148.

56 Göchhausen, pp. 45–64.

57 Göchhausen, p. 78.

58 Steven R. Fletcher, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion, 2003), p. 273.

59 Göchhausen, p. 226.

60 W. Daniel Wilson, Geheimräte gegen Geheimbünde: Ein unbekanntes Kapitel der klassisch-romantischen Geschichte Weimars (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), pp. 168–73; Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 96–100.

61 W. Daniel Wilson, ‘Internalizing the Counter-Revolution: Wieland and the Illuminati Scare’, in The Internalized Revolution: German Reactions to the French Revolution, 1789–1989, ed. by Ehrhard Bahr and Thomas P. Saine (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 33–59 (p. 34); Steven Luckert, ‘From philosophe to Conspirator: Changing Imagines of Voltaire in 18th-Century Germany’, in Voltaire et ses combats: Actes du congrès international, Oxford–Paris, 1994, ed. by Ulla Kölving and Christiane Mervaud, 2 vols (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), ii, 1137–44 (pp. 1139–41).

62 Wolfgang Albrecht, ‘In Biedermannsposen polemisch eifernd wider die “Epidemie der Aufklärungswuth”: Ernst August Anton von Göchhausens Beiträge zur norddeutsch-protestantischen Gegenaufklärung’, in Von ‘Obscuranten’ und ‘Eudämonisten’: Gegenaufklärerische, konservative und antirevolutionäre Publizisten im späten 18. Jahrhundert, ed. by Christoph Weiß and Wolfgang Albrecht (St Ingbert: Röhrig, 1997), pp. 155–92 (p. 163); Helmut Reinalter, ‘Gegen die “Tollwuth der Aufklärungsbarbarei”: Leopold Alois Hoffmann und der frühe Konservatismus in Österreich’, in Von ‘Obscuranten’ und ‘Eudämonisten’, ed. by Weiß and Albrecht, pp. 221–44 (p. 226).

63 A focus on Werther’s errant psychology as a means to overlook the socially critical aspects of the novel is an established part of the novel’s reception history: see Matthew Bell, Goethe’s Naturalistic Anthropology: Man and Other Plants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 71–73.

64 Daniel L. Purdy, Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), pp. 217–19; Ritchie Robertson, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, and Nationalism in the German and Austrian Enlightenment’, in Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, ed. by David Adams and Galin Tihanov (London: Legenda, 2011), pp. 12–30 (pp. 17–18).

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Joanna Raisbeck

Joanna Raisbeck is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellow at the Università degli Studi di Verona. Previously she was a Stipendiary Lecturer at St Hilda’s College and Wadham College, University of Oxford. Recent work includes articles on the appropriation of Novalis by the White Rose and the Anglophone reception of Fichte’s Idealist philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century. Her first book, Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic, was published with Legenda in 2022.