Héloïse and Werther, Sturm und Drang: How the Storm Gave Us the World by Coming into Our Hearts

By Anouchka Vasak
English

Without neglecting literature as a source of meteorological information, meteorology is considered in this article as an anthropological mark, through two European main novels, La Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau, 1761) and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe, 1774). The purpose is to take to the letter the expression Sturm und Drang, which is the name given to early German romanticism. From those literary storms onwards – the dry one on the lake (“séchard” in La Nouvelle Héloïse) and “Sturm” or “Gewitter” in Werther – we can see how the external storm becomes an interior one, as a metaphor of passion, and more generally of painful instability. This crisis that reveals man to his radical loneliness is also for him an occasion to ground his own territory, earth, without resorting to transcendence.

Keywords

  • storm
  • thunderstorm
  • Sturm und Drang
  • subjectivity
  • meteorology
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