THE PUBLICATION OF Ulrich Plenzdorf 's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. caused a commotion. As scholar Dieter Sevin declared: “Neben Christa Wolfs erstem erfolgreichen Werk Der geteilte Himmel wurde kaum ein anderes literarisches Werk bei seiner Veröffentlichung in der DDR mit so viel Furore rezipiert wie Ulrich Plenzdorfs Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.” (Apart from Christa Wolf 's first successful novel Der geteilte Himmel, hardly any other literary work in the GDR was received with such furor as Ulrich Plenzdorfs Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.). Gundula M. Sharman even went so far as to compare the impact of the publication of Plenzdorf's novel with that of Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Indeed, while many young adult readers, in East Germany and West Germany alike, awarded the book cult status, GDR apparatchiks lambasted it. And West German critics were divided. The range of opinion on the subject of the novel may be demonstrated by juxtaposing several different responses to it: that of East German lawyer and mystery writer Friedrich Karl Kaul's letter to the editor of Sinn und Form (where Plenzdorf's novel was originally published), Wilhelm Girnus, on June 12, 1972; that of writer Stephan Hermlin's response to Kaul in Sinn und Form in 1973; that of an East German secondary school student referred to as Monika Sch.; and those of two different West German critics.

Kaul makes his opinion clear:

Kaul does not like the juxtaposition of Goethe with youth culture and with scatological images. This is indicative of the extent to which Goethe was revered in GDR cultural politics, in part as a result of the writings of Georg Lukács. (It is ironic, furthermore, that Kaul uses an abjective metaphor of vomiting in order to describe his disgust with the abjection in Plenzdorf's novel.)