In 1774, a slim volume called Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) appeared anonymously from the Leipzig publisher Weygand. It was the first work of German literature to achieve European best-seller status. Within Germany, it created an absolute furore – not least because the anonymous work did not remain so for long. The text was – and this was public knowledge at the time – embarrassingly close to real-life events.

Goethe, the charismatic angry young man of German letters in the early 1770s, worked for a time in Wetzlar, at the judicial centre of the Holy Roman Empire. There he fell in love with a young woman, Charlotte Buff, engaged to a man called Johann Christian Kestner. The ‘eternal triangle’ of the novel was uncomfortably close to the less-than-eternal triangle in Wetzlar. And while Goethe – who for the rest of his life could not escape being the author of that amazing best-seller – always resented being asked about the relationship between art and real life, he himself, in writing the work, exploited its umbilical linkage to extra-literary events. For the ferocious description of Werther's suicide at the end of the novel, he drew on a case of suicide at Wetzlar; a young man called Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem took his own life – and the event was much talked about both within and beyond Wetzlar.