Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson Page A

interestingly – I had heard that at a house on Carl-August-Allee was a small memorial to the poet.
    It didn’t take long to find: a plain white villa, now housing local government offices, with a thin terracotta frieze running around it at first-floor level like a band of marzipan. It depicted scenes from Weimar’s history. I craned my neck to see the memorial. Eventually I found a podgy-looking cherub, flesh dimpling around thighs andankles, with a mace in one hand and a bugle in the other, his head garlanded with laurels.
    Strange as this was, altogether stranger was the cherub’s backpack, which was in the shape of a miniature castle tower, crenellations and all. Stuffed into it was a bald head that was impossible to mistake – Shakespeare, like a gap-year memento brought home to show off to the neighbours. The memorial had been completed in 1864, to commemorate the tercentenary. Weimar’s trophy cabinet of premier-league intellects was now complete.
    On 20 September 1776, a troupe under the direction of Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, the most acclaimed actor of his day, gave a performance at the Hamburg National Theatre that changed the course of dramatic history. The reports were frenzied: one paper wrote that ‘the numerous audience in the playhouse was so attentive, so transported, that it seemed as if there were only one person present, only one pair of eyes, only one pair of hands, because the stillness was so universal, the silence so numbed’.
    Such was the demand that Schröder’s company acted the same show again and again; the following year they gave it an unprecedented fifteen times, and in Vienna a year later it was performed on another seventy-five occasions. Other troupes, big and small, were soon staging the play. According to one dramaturg, ‘royal cities and tiny market towns, splendid halls and wooden booths echo with [the hero’s] name, and men and boys, virtuosi and reading teachers, First Heroes and letter-carriers, struggle over him and flaunt their immortality’. That hero was a prince; the play, yet again, was a version of
Hamlet.
    I had an idea that one reason for this abrupt flare of interest was Goethe. Two years earlier, back in Frankfurt and by now determined to be a writer, he had published a book that had been even more of a sensation than Schröder’s production.
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
(‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’), printed in 1774, relates the sensational story of a young artist who has fallen helplessly in love with a woman already committed to someone else. Told in the form of letters shared between Werther and a confidant, knowingly named ‘Wilhelm’, it titillates readers with confession after confession, permitting them to eavesdrop on a world of forbidden passion. Building from Werther’sexuberance as he first begins to fall for Lotte, continuing through desperation as he realises the relationship is impossible, the story culminates in suicide, which Werther enacts via the poetic justice of the pistols owned by his lover’s fiancé. The book’s last line is stark: ‘No priest attended.’
    Europe went wild for
Werther.
The 1774 edition passed through thirty reprints before the century was out and was translated into English, French and Italian. Young men began to wear clothes like him; women dabbed on ‘Eau de Werther’. Napoleon claimed it was a favourite. There was moral panic when a young German woman who drowned herself was found to have a copy in her pocket. The city of Leipzig banned the book entirely. It was partly because of its notoriety that Goethe had been invited by Karl August to Weimar.
    Although
Werther
bore striking resemblances to Goethe’s own triangular romance with a woman called Lotte Buff – which didn’t hurt sales when those facts were revealed – I was more struck by its relationship to the writer he had exalted in
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