'Young Goethe in Love' directed by Philipp Stölzl

So it seems that the trick to becoming a literary genius of historical proportions requires one to be devastated and heartbroken. That is certainly the message from Young Goethe in Love, Germany’s answer to Shakespeare. As you may recall, young William became the Bard of epic proportions when he too lost his beloved to another man in the Virginia colony. So heartbroken was young William that he immortalized his lost love in Romeo & Juliet, or so the movie tells us. In Young Goethe in Love, young Johann suffers the same fate in the German countryside when he enters into a star-crossed union of his own.

Goethe was the writer responsible for launching a thousand love sick suicides when he published The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired by his ill-fated romance with Lotte Buff. The failed law student encountered Lotte at a ball and she quickly became his muse. The film suggests that Lotte inspired young Johann’s love of the dramatic. Despite their love, Lotte must marry another man chosen by her widower father for being more established and stable than the pre-fame Johann.

Young Johann is seen as a deeply creative man who has a flair for the overstated. His poetry is seen as useless by his father. It’s obvious that his destiny is in question once he fails his law exams. Johann’s attempt to salvage his legal career rural Germany only cements his true path: immortal literary prominence. Luckily for Johann, his muse didn’t leave him when Lotte married another man. Whatever she inspired in him he claimed as his own and went on to publish one masterpiece after another. Did his broken heart act as a catalyst for his prolific literary genius? Probably. How else was Johann going to live on in Lotte’s memory other than through his fame?