German literature of the 18th century emerged not from the imitation of works of the English empiricist Enlightenment nor from Gottsched’s Leibniz-Wolffi an and France-oriented rationalism but from the confl ict of the two, a confl ict which mirrored the diverging interests of the offi cial and the bourgeois wings of the German middle class, and which intensifi ed as the century wore on. The direct opposition to Gottsched was 40
concentrated in two areas of self-governing republicanism, Bremen in the north and Switzerland in the south, where the poetry of the anti-monarchist Milton, rich in depictions of the supernatural, was hailed as the counter-example to rationalism.
The creative compromise between Gottsched and Milton was found, however, by a brilliant theology student in Leipzig, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). In 1748 Klopstock published the fi rst three cantos of The Messiah ( Der Messias), a would-be Miltonic epic on the theme that had defeated Milton, the redemptive action of Christ, and written in hexameters, the metre of Homer and Virgil, previously little used in German.
Klopstock went on to adapt Greek and Latin strophic forms in his
‘odes’, and these shorter poems on love, friendship, nature, and The la
moral and patriotic themes – and the pleasures of ice-skating, for which he had a passion – show, better than his epic, the ying of the f
truly revolutionary feature of his writing: a new conception of the seriousness and autonomy of literature. He was committed o
to the commercial medium of the printed and published word, undations (t
not to Gottsched’s semi-courtly medium of the theatre, but he was claiming for what he wrote an authority equal to that of the state institutions of the university (which provided the o 1781)
scholarly basis for his formal innovations) and of the Church (which gave him the subject matter of The Messiah and the theological language of his other poems). In Klopstock’s odes, however, the purpose of the frequent invocations of God and immortality is not to explore a religious mystery, but to underline the unique signifi cance that attaches to his experience and his feelings simply because they are his, and because – as the strange and monumental form tells us – he is a poet. The anxious, slightly puzzled, naturalist who recounted his quest for order in Brockes’ poems was replaced by a consciousness that knew itself to be the source of the meaning it found in a landscape, a thunderstorm, a summer’s night. The shape of things to come became apparent when, on the publication of the fi rst cantos of The Messiah, a patron emerged who was willing to underwrite this claim to exceptionality. The king of Denmark granted 41
Klopstock a pension so that the epic could be completed and he gave up his theological studies to become Germany’s fi rst full-time poet.
If poetry became the religion of Klopstock, Greek art became the religion of another ex-theologian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), who escaped altogether from the Germany that offered him only the drudgery of schoolmastering and tutoring to devote himself to the study of ancient art in Rome. In Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture ( Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 1755), he argued that the physical and moral beauty that we fi nd in the art of the ancient Greeks derives from the merits of their society and religion; by imitating their art we can hope to recover those ancient perfections. The
‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’, as his famous phrase has it, of their best works can suffuse our art, and lives, and – the ature er implication seems to follow – our society and religion too. His ecstatic descriptions of particular works, above all the Belvederean Apollo, use the language of Pietist enthusiasm to suggest that German Lit
through his own feelings and words the spirit of the ancient deities has re-awoken to become active in the modern world. As yet poetry and the visual arts were not understood as branches of the same human activity – what we now call ‘Art’ – but once they had both begun to be seen as alternative secular channels of divine revelation a fi rst step had been taken towards a general aesthetic theory. (The term ‘aesthetics’ itself entered academic currency in 1750 as an invention of the Prussian disciple of Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten [1714–62].)
Among the German middle classes, however, the most widely disseminated substitute for the institutional religion that was so closely associated with princely dominance was in the mid-18th century neither poetry nor the visual arts, but an intense interest in personal feelings. The inner sanctum of pre-social identity, 42
5. Wieland, the model 18th-century man of letters, at his writing desk, 1806
43
which Pietism called the soul, and Leibnizianism called the monad, was given a secular form as the power of having emotions, and here at least the individual could feel master of his or her fate. Men and women alike found themselves in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), so that its German translation almost immediately provided the name of their culture of tears:
‘ Empfi ndsamkeit’, ‘Sentimentalism’.
Their mentor was Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), though not all of Wieland’s readers perceived the extent to which his refi ned materialism undermined the security of their inner fastness. Another son of a pastor who was early troubled by religious doubts, after translating Shakespeare he eventually found his literary metier: the novel, or romance, set in an imaginary world, usually a schematic and sunlit classical antiquity, in which an amusing plot, psychologically subtle and fl irtatiously erotic, was recounted by a shrewd and ironical ature er narrator. It was a compromise with the manner of Fielding, perfectly attuned to German circumstances. No risks were run through any direct representation of contemporary reality, but a German Lit
kind of realism was none the less achieved. The effects of human emotions on the mind, on moral, philosophical, and political attitudes, were analysed with great delicacy in these novels (notably Agathon, fi rst edition 1767), in Wieland’s exquisite verse narratives (for example, Musarion, 1768), and in his letters. He was at the centre of a Germany-wide web of letter-writers who exchanged with each other thoughts and feelings, and thoughts about feelings, occasioned by the incidents of their uneventful lives or by the books they were reading (whether religious or, with increasing likelihood, not). The balance that, with a deceptive appearance of ease, he achieved between sense and reason in his thinking, and in his writing between imported and native traditions, Wieland also achieved in his personal affairs between offi cialdom and private enterprise. In 1769 he was appointed to a professorship of philosophy at the little university of Erfurt and three years later he accepted the invitation of Anna Amalia, regent 44
of the nearby duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to become tutor to her son Karl August, who was approaching his majority. Wieland took the Duchess’s shilling and settled in Weimar but he did not lose his independence. In 1773 he began a literary newspaper Der Teutsche Merkur ( The German Mercury), in which his correspondence network went over seamlessly into print. It became the most successful periodical in southern Germany, and, though he eventually retired from full-time editorship, it provided him with a supplementary income for the rest of his long and productive life.
The Seven Years War, which in 1763 appeared to conclude with the triumph of the Protestant interest, inaugurated in Germany The la
a new and more turbulent phase of cultural transformation.
The greatly heightened prestige of English culture after the ying of the f
war meant easier access to a free-thinking and individualist Enlightenment, which increased the friction between intellectuals o
and the social and political structure of absolutist Germany.
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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), for example, was the son of a pastor and studied theology in Leipzig, but the combined infl uences of English deism and of Gottsched’s favourite troupe o 1781)
of actors led him to abandon a clerical career for the uncertain l
ife of a literary freelance. Having written plays since his teens he had his fi rst major success in 1755 with Miss Sara Sampson, virtually a manifesto for the English style. This fi rst German, or
‘bourgeois’ tragedy ( bürgerliches Trauerspiel), with its indecisive seducer, virtuous victim, and sorrowing father, was an implausible attempt to put on the stage the Richardsonian multi-volume novel of sentiment. To that extent it subscribed to Gottsched’s view that the drama, not the novel, was to be the means of literary self-expression for the German middle classes. But in 1759
Lessing carried out the most effective literary assassination in the German language when in a single issue of his periodical he dismissed Gottsched’s ‘reforms’, put Shakespeare in the place of Gottsched’s French models, and pointed German writers looking for authentic local material to the home-grown story of Dr Faust 45
(whom he envisaged as an Enlightenment seeker after truth, who could certainly not be condemned to eternal punishment). In the immediate aftermath of the war Lessing then wrote a comedy which confi rmed both his commitment to a realist literature of contemporary life and his distaste for the politics of Frederick the Great, whose campaigns had brought Silesia to Prussia but had devastated Dresden, Leipzig, and the Saxon economy: Minna von Barnhelm (published 1767) is the earliest German play to have been continuously in the repertoire since its publication, though its sardonic undertones have not always been appreciated.
Lessing seemed in the 1760s to be German literature’s most radical voice, indeed he was helping to redefi ne what literature was. As an ex-theologian, struggling to fi nd himself a niche in the private sector, and opposed to the authoritarianism of either state or church, he represented all the social interests that might lie behind a shift from rationalism to empiricism, and from French to English models. But he knew the precariousness of his ature er position. In 1766 he published a theoretical treatise, Laocöon, which purported to differentiate literature from painting, but thereby implied an initial comparability between them and so German Lit
prepared the way for the view that they were both after all only variations on the same human activity that would soon be known as ‘Art’. The ambiguity – was literature a power in its own right or did it belong with such other adornments of court life as the visual arts? – refl ected Lessing’s awareness of his vulnerable social position and of the possibility that in Germany literature might not be able to establish itself as an economically and politically independent cultural authority. He spent the next three years as the house playwright for a doomed attempt by the Hamburg bourgeoisie to set up their own ‘National Theatre’. After its collapse he accepted that only if he compromised his principles could he make the decent living that would allow him to marry and settle down, and in 1770 he entered princely service as the librarian of the Duke of Brunswick in Wolfenbüttel. His last tragedy, Emilia Galotti (1772), was a bitter farewell to his earlier life, a story of the corrupting effect of absolute power both on the 46
prince who wields it and on his middle-class victims, whose only defence against him is moral and physical self-destruction.
The achievement of literary greatness through a disappointed love-affair with England was the unexpected outcome of the career of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), Germany’s most prominent natural scientist (he was professor of physics in Göttingen and the teacher of Gauss), and an entertaining and effective satirist of various fashionable intellectual follies. A subject of George III, whom he knew personally, he twice visited what he called ‘the Isles of the Blessed’, and admired English science, industry, literature, and political institutions. All his life he gathered materials for a comic novel in the English manner The la
but what his literary executors found was far better than any completed pastiche of Fielding or Sterne would have been: the ying of the f
commonplace books in which day by day he had recorded ideas, fragments, refl ections, turns of phrase, the fi rst, most varied, and o
most personal German collection of aphorisms, a form in which undations (t
the English have never excelled:
In many a work of a famous man I would rather read what he cut o 1781)
out than what he has left in.
When he saw a midge fl y into the candle and it now lay in the throes of death he said: ‘Down with the bitter cup, you poor creature, a professor is watching, and is sorry for you.’
English geniuses go on ahead of fashion and German geniuses come along behind it.
If only Germany too could have a free and active middle class, outward-looking and confi dently realistic, individualistic to the point, if necessary, of eccentricity, and with a literature, and especially with novels, to match! That longing was the energy that powered the literary turmoil of the 1760s and 1770s, which has become known by the title of one of the minor plays it 47
produced, Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) . The theorist of the movement, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), an East Prussian from what is now Poland, spent his life in struggle with the dominant forces of secularization and absolutism. Despite a serious crisis of faith in the early 1770s he refused to bow to the authority of deist critique and remained a clergyman, but though therefore a state offi cial he maintained a middle-class hostility to monarchs. He envisaged, but never quite achieved, a synthesis of aesthetics, theology, and the rapidly expanding fi eld of cultural anthropology, which he was one of the fi rst to attempt to organize: indeed, his conviction that the material circumstances of a people’s life, their skills, language, beliefs and artistic and literary practices, make up a single self-suffi cient and characteristic whole was instrumental in forming the modern concept of a ‘culture’. It was Leibnizian monadism applied to history. Individual human beings too, he thought, have a unique character, an ‘original genius’, which particularly through the ature er medium of language can become a people’s common possession.
Literature, whether sacred or secular, is a tissue of individual and collective genius. Shakespeare was a ‘dramatic God’, a maker of German Lit
worlds, but he could not be detached from the English culture which had formed him and which he then helped to form. It followed that Germany could not acquire a national literature like that of England or France merely by imitating English or French models: Germany had to identify and draw on its own resources, on its medieval past, its popular entertainments, its folk song.
At Strasbourg university in the winter of 1770–1 Herder met the man he thought capable of that task: Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832).
Goethe was exceptional among 18th-century German writers, and not just in his abilities: at least as a young man, he had no need to write for money, or even to work at all. He was a true bourgeois, a member of the upper middle class of the Imperial Free City of Frankfurt. His mother was the daughter of the town clerk, his father lived on his capital, and he studied law – fi rst at Leipzig 48
(where he met Gottsched) and then at Strasbourg – more in order to occupy than to advance himself. He was spared the anxieties and necessities which drove his contemporaries into a creative compromise with their political masters and he might eventually have been lost to literature altogether. But Herder showed him how the traditions of the late-medieval and early-modern German towns that he embodied met the literary need of the moment and could in him re-enter the mainstream. On his return to Frankfurt, having proclaimed to his friends his conversion to Shakespeare, Goethe completed in six weeks the fi rst draft of a prose chronicle play, unlike anything in German before it, with 59 changes of scene, based on the memoirs of the early 16th-century robber baron Götz von Berlichingen, and with a cameo part for Martin The la
Luther. He became increasingly interested in the 16th century, when German urban culture had been of European signifi cance, ying of the f
he studied Hans Sachs and imitated his verse, and like Lessing he began to think of re-dramatizing the story of Dr Faust. Goethe’s o
Strasbou
rg experience was, fundamentally, and thanks to Herder, undations (t
linguistic: the discovery of the literary potential of the language of ordinary people outside the established educational, cultural, and political institutions. There is nothing like the language of the o 1781)
best scenes in Götz von Berlichingen (published 1773) in French or English literature of the time, except perhaps in the work of Robert Burns. A few acquaintances shared his experience and inspiration, notably Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–92) and Heinrich Leopold Wagner (1747–79), and they were the creative core of the Storm and Stress movement, though others made more noise.
Goethe’s greatness lay, however, in his ability to bring together all the strands of contemporary intellectual life (and in his being free to do so). In the 1770s and early 1780s, he poured out a cornucopia of lyrical poems, many of them the inspiration of a moment, some left unpublished for years, and nearly all of them unique in form: ballads, imitations of folk song, rhymed fragments that catch an emotion on the wing, full-length odes, 49
mysterious chants, and unclassifi able poetic responses to – rather than meditations on – life, God, love, and Nature, some only half-emerged from the context of a letter or a diary. They have become some of his best-known works, not least because of their appeal to generations of composers. They are the product not just of the new intimacy with the spoken German language and German popular traditions that he gained in Strasbourg and of his intuitive response to Shakespeare’s symbolic use of natural imagery, but also of a confi dence, learned from Klopstock, in the vivifying poetic consciousness, and of an openness to the Pietist and Sentimentalist practice of self-scrutiny. Goethe sought and cultivated friendships through the Sentimentalist network, of which his own correspondence quickly became a valued part. An instinct seems to have told him that Wieland’s path of compromise had more future in Germany than any attempt to set up an autonomous middle-class culture, and he became increasingly aware of the tragic potential in the movement which ature er saw him as the growing-point, or even the ‘Messiah’, of German literature. Götz von Berlichingen is an ambiguous play, and not just because its hero’s iron hand is a symbol both of strength and German Lit
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