Who was Charlotte Buff and how did she inspire Goethe’s writing?

Charlotte (“Lotte”) Buff was a woman whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe met in Wetzlar in 1772 while he was gaining legal experience at the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire. Although Goethe fell in love with her, she was already engaged to another man, leading to an emotionally difficult summer for the poet.1

Buff served as the primary inspiration for the character of Lotte, the heroine of Goethe’s immensely successful 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. In the novel, the protagonist, Werther, falls in love with the uncomplicated fiancée of a friend, mirroring Goethe’s own experience with Buff. Goethe fused his personal feelings for Buff with the real-life suicide of a Wetzlar acquaintance, Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem, to create the narrative of the novel. It is important to distinguish her from Charlotte von Stein, another significant influence on Goethe’s life and work, who inspired different female figures in his later writing.123