Die Lesewut (

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

for the ''reading craze'') or Die Lesesucht (''reading mania''), are terms that describe a period in

German history The concept of Germany as a distinct region in Central Europe can be traced to Julius Caesar, who referred to the unconquered area east of the Rhine as ''Germania'', thus distinguishing it from Gaul. The victory of the Cherusci, Germanic tribes ...

beginning in the eighteenth century. Goethe's

The Sorrows of Young Werther ''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' (; ), or simply ''Werther'', is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the ''Sturm und Drang'' ...

and the

Sturm und Drang (, ; usually translated as "storm and stress") was a proto-Romanticism, Romantic movement in German literature and Music of Germany, music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. Within the movement, individual subjectivity an ...

movement are considered to have been the catalyst for this event.

References

German literature German words and phrases {{Germany-lit-stub