1772: The 23-year-old law student, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, flunks his oral exams. His angry father sends him to the Imperial High Court in Wetzlar. Goethe, who dreams of a career as a poet and has to digest the rejection of his play Götz von Berlichingen, falls in love with Charlotte Buff. But her father has already promised her to another man. Goethe reacts to his misfortune by writing The Sorrows of Young Werther — and overnight, the novel makes him the new star of German literature.

His law professors tell Goethe that students are better off reading textbooks than hacks like Lessing and Shakespeare, and his father doesn’t think much of his son’s literary ambition, either. He reacts furiously to Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkönig” and sends his son off to the Imperial High Court in Wetzlar to prove himself on the job. Goethe doesn’t much enjoy studying court records, but with his new friend and colleague, Wilhelm Jerusalem, he conscientiously does the work to the satisfaction of the court councillor, Kestner. Goethe meets Charlotte Buff at a ball, then encounters her again after hearing her sing in the church choir. He visits the young woman, who lives with her father and many siblings in nearby Wahlheim. When they next meet, they make love in the great outdoors. Although they are overjoyed, their happiness is short-lived: Lotte’s father has long intended his daughter to marry another man. When the conservative jurist, Kestner, asks Goethe to advise him on how to win his beloved’s heart, Goethe has no idea which woman is concerned. But hoping to visit Lotte, who has sensibly consented to marry the court councillor, Goethe bursts unknowingly into their engagement party — and Kestner quickly realizes the nature of their relationship. After Wilhelm Jerusalem, who is also unhappy in love, shoots himself, Kestner reacts so coldly to his suicide that Goethe furiously boxes his ears. The court councillor demands retribution, then intentionally shoots into the air during the duel. Goethe is arrested and in gaol, pours out his own distress, writing The Sorrows of Young Werther as if in a trance. He gives Lotte the manuscript and asks her to burn it. But instead of following this request, she gives the text to a publisher. Half a year later, Goethe’s father brings his son back to Frankfurt, and they arrive at a scene of great commotion: people want to read “Werther” and are clamouring for more copies. Goethe has become the young star of German literature, something even his father acknowledges with pride.

Lotte had told the publisher, “That’s our story!” – “Is all that true?” the man wants to know. “It’s beyond truth,” says the young woman. “It’s poetry!” This must have been Philipp Stölzl’s guiding principle when he conceived his film and transposed his fiction onto established fact. Goethe flunking his law exams, working in the Imperial High Court in Wetzlar, and having Kestner as his boss are all invented. What’s more, Lotte was already married to Kestner before she met Goethe, and The Sorrows of Young Werther was written after Goethe had left Wetzlar. Finally, Lotte was not the only woman who provoked him to write the epistolary novel which, incidentally, was also not written in a gaol in Wetzlar. It’s important to understand that this film is a work of fiction. And yet Goethe and his work are present throughout the film. Stölzl hasn’t just used exact quotes in the dialogue (sometimes the eponymous hero uses Goethe quotes as if he’s just made them up)—many of his visual themes, too, evoke Goethe’s work. Goethe waiting for Lotte in front of the church, the fair and the poet’s drunken bender all allude to Faust, and the father’s advice to his son (“A useless life is an early death”) comes from the Iphigenia in Tauris drama.

While one can debate fictionalising the material, this cannot be blamed on the director’s ignorance. “I think that Goethe deserves a new approach. When you read him, you discover vigorous, fresh, clever but also dirty literature. For me it was exciting to ask: how did this guy tick in his youth? You don’t necessarily come closer to a historical character by sticking to the facts. It’s more important to capture the character’s feel for life than to reproduce the historical truth” (Philipp Stölzl). Significantly, the filmmaker concentrated on the young Goethe, to whom he could assign a lot of spontaneity and literal Sturm und Drang—albeit at the cost of historical accuracy, since Goethe was not the young loner portrayed in the film. As the German reviews suggest, Stölzl’s work must have displeased many philologists. But at the same time, this film about a young, impetuous and occasionally rather wild author has managed to interest a young audience in Goethe much more than a lot of more staid work about the German ‘poet laureate’.

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

2009/2010

Production Year

2010

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:2,35

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Justice, Love, Literature, Education

Scope of Rights

Nichtexklusive nichtkommerzielle öffentliche Aufführung (nonexclusive, noncommercial public screening),Keine TV-Rechte (no TV rights)

Notes to the Licence

Bibliothekenrechte: ja

35mm: Deutsch, mit englischen Untertiteln, mit spanischen Untertiteln, mit französischen Untertiteln

Licence Period

28.02.2025

Permanently Restricted Areas

Germany (DE), Austria (AT), Switzerland (CH), Liechtenstein (LI), Alto Adige, Luxembourg (LU)

Available Media

DVD, 35mm

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Greek (el)

35mm

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Greek (el)

• Goethe!
• Philipp Stölzl