[Co-responsibility in suicide? Coping with grief and guilt by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe].

Under the presumption of having promoted some young people's suicides by publishing his novel "Werther", Goethe was deeply affected by the suicide of Christiane von Lassberg, the 28-year old daughter of a Weimarian officer. The subject of this essay is to investigate how Goethe worked on the mental conflict of guilt and grief and how he counteracted the danger of paralysing depressions by active intervention and which form of literary expressions he chose.