On a morning in 1807, a lovelorn, twenty-year-old German immigrant named Bertell settled on the sandy banks of the New Jersey-side of the Hudson River in Secaucus and carefully laid out a copy of his fellow countrymen Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (published more than three decades before) to page 70, where an underlined passage read, “They are loaded—the clock strikes twelve—I go,” placed a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. Bertell’s discoverers described him as “genteelly dressed,” perhaps in the fashionable boots, blue jacket, and yellow britches and waistcoat of his favorite book’s titular character. At least that’s how many victims of the “Werther Effect,” copycat suicides in the fashion of Goethe’s protagonist, were reported to have outfitted themselves.
In Germany and England, France and America, there were a rash of suicides like Bertell’s: men who were scarcely out of adolescence inspired by the self-destruction of Goethe’s Romantic hero. propelled Goethe—only 25 when it was published 250 years ago—into literary superstardom. “Werther Fever” enveloped Europe, from Napoleon Bonaparte carrying a copy on his Egyptian campaign to a perfume marketed under the name.
Goethe’s details the sorry ending of its poetic-minded protagonist, rejected by both the nobility for whom he is too middling and the unconsummated love of a woman betrothed to another man. “The human race is but a monotonous affair,” writes Goethe, “Most o.