Rudiger Safranski sets his sights on the writer considered the Shakespeare of German literature. Goethe (1749-1832) awakened a burgeoning German nation and the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski scoured Goethe's oeuvre, relying on primary sources as well as his correspondence with contemporaries and their comments to one another, to produce an illuminating portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era.