Goethe, Werther, Eisermann

“Generations of readers and scholars have racked their brains over Goethe’s Werther. Was he a narcissist, a stalker, autistic, or psychotic? Or simply a man unhappily in love who could only satisfy his unfulfilled longing by taking his own life? In any case, contemporary audiences loved him—the first pop star in literary history—and turned Goethe’s epistolary novel *The Sorrows of Young Werther* into a Europe-wide bestseller in 1774, one year after his *Sturm und Drang* drama *Götz von Berlichingen*. Complete with everything that is part of celebrity culture even today: young people adopted the “Werther look”—a blue tailcoat, brass buttons, a yellow vest, brown knee-high boots, and a round felt hat—and drank from Werther mugs. (...) Werther does not see things as they are, but as he wants them to be. The parallels to today are striking, with resentment and anger shaping politics. The desperate Werther breaks down because he projects his longings onto his beloved Lotte, makes them public, and is misunderstood—something that happens constantly on so-called social media today.” This is how journalist Andreas Sommer describes in the *Heilbronner Stimme* the special fascination that emanates from the novel—a fascination that André Eisermann and pianist Jakob Vinje convey so brilliantly in this “spoken word performance.”