I remember the Erlkönig; I was quite young when I had to learn the poem by heart at school and it really impressed me. In fact its dark theme still gives me the creeps - now perhaps even more than when I was a child. Instinctively the Erlkönig for me represents death who has come to take the ailing child with him. But of course the more psychoanalytical interpretations also make a lot of sense, escpecially with the lines Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt.
Larva quite recently had to read Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling" for homework. At first she had no clue what it all was about, for she is not used to older German and a story told in rhymes, but when I started to act it with her and we watched parts of the film "Merlin and Mim" in which a similar scene is depicted, she derived so much fun out of it, that she started to learn it.
Whenever I was fed up with the world as a teen, I started to act Faustus and recited the monologue from the beginning of Faust 1. Can you tell I like Goethe? But reading Werther I remember being torture for me. As much as I liked Faust, as much I despised Werther. Perhaps he was just too emo for my liking.