Buff, Charlotte (1753–1828)

German woman loved by the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his youth. When they met in Wetzlar, near Frankfurt, in June 1772, she was engaged to Georg Christian Kestner (1741–1800), whom she later married 1773. She was the prototype of Goethe's heroine in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Thomas Mann described an imaginary meeting of Charlotte and the old Goethe in his novel Lotte in Weimar (1939).