n the footsteps of murderous sadness: depersonalization, alienated labor and Kriminal-geschichtein Die Leiden des jungen Werthersby J.W. von Goethe

Abstract

190 years after the departure of the renowned German writer, one of his early works is of great importance today in order to understand the relevance of his criticism of societies entrenched in the annulment of individuals. This article aims to dwell on two specific points of the famous novella. The first point has to do with the incipient bureaucratization of work at the dawn of capitalist modernity in eighteenth-century Germany and the deformation of the subject, the consequence of which is an existence mediated by the thanatic. This primacy of the thanatic becomes the creation of a criminal potential and an alienation with a marked homicidal accent. The second point is related to a reading proposal: Goethe appropriates the elements of the Kriminalgeschic hten to point out a series of social, religious and political problems linked to the revolutionary aspirations of the German bourgeoisie of the period. The conjunction of both elements allows to renew the importance of the novella in relation to a critique of the oppressive public legal, social and economic forms that are found in the contradictory ideological structures of modernity in Germany.