Lost Affinities: Don Quixote, Die Leiden des Jungen Werther (1774) and the German Cervantine Tradition

Abstract

In general, the studies devoted to the analysis of Goethe’s Cervantean heritage have highlighted the interest of the German author for the works of the Spanish novelist, within the context of a clear lack of interest for Spanish letters from Goethe. In this article I will try to analyse how Cervantes and the German Cervantean tradition are an important sub-text for Die Leiden des jungen Werther. From my point of view, in his novel, Goethe articulates the portrait of a failed reader or (mis-)reader, establishing thereby a fruitful dialogue with Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the German Cervantean tradition of the second half of the eighteenth century, inaugurating at the same time a new path for the European Cervantean tradition by transforming Werther’s quixotism in a bookish interpretation of reality, and not a mental transformation of it.