Johann Georg Christian Kestner (28 August 1741 – 24 May 1800) was a German lawyer and archivist.

[1] As a young Brunswick-Lüneburg legation secretary in the imperial chamber court (Reichskammergericht) in Wetzlar from 1767 to 1773, he met and became engaged to Charlotte Buff, a daughter of the bailiff of the local Deutschordenshof.

This love and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem's suicide using Kestner's borrowed pistols were both used by Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther, which first appeared in 1774.

Buff and Kestner married in 1773 in Wetzlar and then moved to Hanover, where he became vice-archivist and privy councillor to the Hanoverian court.

He and Buff had twelve children, with Goethe acting as godfather to the eldest son Georg, who followed his father as an archivist.