Dear Werther readers,
I couldn’t resist a quick message to say that today is Werther’s birthday!
As you’ll discover next month – when we read The Sorrows of Young Werther – on this day Lotte gives Werther one of the pink ribbons she was wearing when he first met her. ‘I have been kissing that bow a thousand times over,’ he writes.
But today was also Goethe’s birthday. Like his hero, he was born on 28 August 1749, exactly 275 years ago today.
And by remarkable coincidence, today was also the birthday of Johann Christian Kestner – Goethe’s friend and the model for Albert, Lotte’s husband in the novel . . .
Since 1819, many German towns celebrate the 28th of August with festivals, speeches and other commemorative events, often featuring Goethe’s favourite potato cake.
In Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann (1939), a novel that reconstructs the moment when Goethe met the real Lotte again, forty years after the events fictionalised in The Sorrows of Young Werther, Mann calls this date ‘the now immortal 28th of August’.
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I went down the rabbit hole on the linked article about his birthday celebrations. How delightful that people started mass celebrating his birthday even before his death!
M birthday was three days ago--Goethe is making me feel very YOUNG!