by Will Durant
With this exaltation of feeling and poetry, the Teutonic soul was primed for such flights of imaginative literature as made the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany recall the fervor and fertility of Elizabethan England. Magazines of poetry multiplied, suffering their usual brief tenure of life. Johann Heinrich Voss, besides translating Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare, wrote a tender novel in verse, Luise (1783-95), which won the heart of Germany and stirred Goethe to rivalry. Salomon Gessner gained an international audience with his delicate lyrics and prose pastorals. Matthias Claudius touched a hundred thousand mothers with idyllic songs of domesticity, like his “Wiegenlied bei Mondenschein zu singen” (Lullaby to Sing by the Light of the Moon):
So schlafe nun, du Kleine!
Was weinest du?
Sanft ist im Mondenscheine
Und süss die Ruh.
Auch kommt der Schlaf geschwinder,
Und sonder Müh.
Der Mond freut sich der Kinder,
Und liebet sie.
Sleep now, my little girl!
Why do you cry?
Soft in the moonlight,
And sweet, is rest.
Then sooner comes sleep,
And without pain.
The moon rejoices in children,
And loves you.85
Gottfried Bürger had all the qualities of a romantic genius. Son of a pastor, he was sent to Halle and Göttingen to study law, but his dissolute life led to his withdrawal from college. In 1773 he won universal absolution of his sins by his ballad “Lenore.” Lenore’s lover goes off with Frederick’s army to the siege of Prague. Each morning she starts up from her dreams and asks, “Wil-helm, are you faithless, or dead? How long will you tarry?” The war ends; the troops return; wives and mothers and children greet them with joy and thanks to God.
Sie frug den Zug wohl auf und ab
Und frug nach allen Namen,
Dock keiner war der Kundschaft gab
Von alien, so da kamen.
Als nun das Heer vorüber war,
Zerraufte sie ihr Rabenhaar,
Und warf sich hin zur Erde
Mit wütiger Gebärde .
She questioned all in that parade,
And begged of each his name,
But there was none who gave her word,
None of all who came.
And when the soldiers all were gone
She tore her raven hair,
And threw herself upon the ground
In throes of wild despair.
Her mother tells her that “what God does is well done”; Lenore answers that this is a delusion, and she begs for death. The mother talks to her of heaven and hell; Lenore replies that heaven is to be with Wilhelm, hell is to be without him. All day long she raves. At night a rider draws up at her door, gives no name, bids her come with him and be his bride. She rides behind him on his black horse, rides all through the night. They come to a cemetery; ghosts dance around them. Suddenly the horseman turns into a corpse; Lenore finds herself clinging to a skeleton. While she hovers between life and death spirits wail these words:
Geduld, Geduld! Wenn’s Herz auch bricht!
Mit Gott im Himmel hadre nicht.
Des Leibes bist du ledig;
Gott sei der Seele gnädig!
Patience, patience! Even when the heart breaks!
With God in heaven quarrel not.
Of your body you are shorn;
God have mercy on your soul!86
VII. STURM UND DRANG
From the piety of Klopstock and the tenderness of Gessner the Romantic movement surged on to the irreverent individualism, the “storming and striving” of German youth in the ecstasy of moral and social revolt. The stiff aristocracy of the courts, the fading dogmas of the preachers, the dreary money-grubbing of the business class, the dulling routine of bureaucrats, the pompous pedantry of pundits—all aroused the resentment of young Germans conscious of ability and deprived of place. They listened to Rousseau’s cry for naturalness and freedom, but took no stock in his apotheosis of the “general will.” They agreed with him in rejecting materialism, rationalism, and determinism, and with Lessing in preferring the lusty irregularity of Shakespeare to the cramping classicism of Corneille and Racine. They relished Voltaire’s wit, but thought they found a desert where he had passed. They were thrilled by the rebellion of the American colonies against England. “We wished the Americans all success,” Goethe recalled; “the names of Franklin and Washington began to shine and sparkle in the firmament of politics and war.”87 These Stürmer und Dränger felt the intoxication of physical adolescence and mental awakening, and bemoaned the incubus of the old upon the young, of the state upon the soul. They were all for originality, for direct experience and unhindered expression, and some of them believed that their genius exempted them from the law. They felt that time was on their side, that the near future would see their victory. “Oh,” exclaimed Goethe, “that was a good time when Merck and I were young!”88
Some rebels expressed their philosophy by defying the conventions of dress and replacing them with conventions of their own; so Christoph Kauf-mann went about with head uncovered, hair uncombed, and shirt open to the navel.89 But this was exceptional; most of the protagonists, barring a suicide or two, avoided such inverted sartorial display; and some of them were well-to-do. Goethe himself was one of the progenitors of Sturm und Drang with his play Götz von Berlichingen (1773); and in the following year his Werther became the triumphant standard of Romanticism; Schiller joined the movement with Die Räuber (1781); but these complex and evolving spirits soon left the campaign to more impassioned and weakly-rooted youths.
Johann Merck was one of the founding fathers. To all appearances he was sane and strong; he had gone through university, was persona grata at the court of Hesse-Darmstadt, became paymaster general of the army, and had a reputation for both sharp intelligence and practical ability. Goethe, meeting him in 1771, was favorably impressed, and shared with him and Herder in maintaining a critical review, the Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen; hence the rebels were at first called “Frankfurters.”90 Familiar with business and politics, traveling through Germany and into Russia, Merck saw and satirized the vanities of wealth, the tedium of courts, and the exploitation of the peasantry. Finding himself powerless to reform these conditions, he became bitter and cynical. Goethe called him “Mephistopheles Merck,” and took himself and Merck as part models for the protagonists in Faust. Reverses in business and misery in marriage unsettled Merck’s mind. He sank into debt, from which the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, at Goethe’s request, rescued him. He fell a prey to persistent melancholy, and killed himself at the age of fifty (1791).
Even more tragic was the career of Reinhold Lenz. Son of a Lutheran pastor in Livonia, his weak nerves and excitable temperament were affected in childhood by stress on the doctrines of sin and hell.91 He was helped for a time by hearing Kant’s lectures in Königsberg; Kant introduced him to Rousseau’s writings, and soon Lenz spoke of La Nouvelle Héloïse as the best book ever printed in France. At Strasbourg he met Goethe, was fascinated by his positive character, imitated him in thought and style, wrote lyrics so much like Goethe’s that they were included in some editions of Goethe’s works. He went on to Sesenheim, fell in love (after Goethe) with Friederike Brion, and composed fervent poems in her praise. He assured her that unless she returned his love he would kill himself; she did not and he did not. He moved to Weimar, was befriended by Goethe, envied Goethe’s success, mocked Goethe’s relation with Charlotte von Stein, and was invited by the Duke to leave the duchy. He had considerable talent as poet and dramatist. One of his plays, Die Soldaten, sharply satirized class distinctions and bourgeois life; its central character is a middle-class girl who, aspiring in vain to marry an officer, becomes a prostitute and solicits her unrecognized father in the streets. Himself too unstable to find a firm footing in life, Lenz wandered from post to post and failure to failure, suffered spells of madness, repeatedly tried suicid
e, and died insane (1792).
Maximilian von Klinger was the cleverest of the Stürmer. He denounced the world and rose to high place in it; he indulged in violent speech in his plays, and became curator of the University of Dorpat; he enjoyed all the oats and follies of youth and lived to be seventy-nine. It was of him that Goethe wrote the perceptive line, “In girls we love what they are, but in young men what they promise to be.” Klinger’s most famous play, Sturm und Drang (1776), written at the age of twenty-four, gave its name and mood to the movement. It showed European rebels expatriating themselves to America in the hope of finding free outlets for their individualities; its language was that of passion run wild; its gospel was that of genius liberated from all rules. Klinger served in the Austrian and Russian armies, married a natural daughter of Catherine the Great, subsided into a professorship, and congealed into a pillar of the state.
Wilhelm Heinse capped Sturm und Drang with a novel, Ardinghello (1787), which united anarchism, nihilism, communism, fascism, amoralism, and will to power in a revel of sensuality and crime. Crime is not crime, says the hero, if it is brave; the only real crime is weakness; the truest virtues are strength and courage of body and will. Life is the manifestation of elemental instincts, and we miss the mark if we brand these as immoral. So Ardinghello seduces and murders at opportunity or whim, and sees in his unshackled passions nature’s highest law. He describes the exploits of Hannibal, honors him as a superman, and asks: “What are millions of men—who all their lives have not had a single hour like his—compared with this one man?”92 He founds a communistic society with communism of women, woman suffrage, and the worship of the elements as the only religion.
In the confused whirlwind of Sturm und Drang some dominating ideas gave the movement character and influence. Most of its leaders came from the middle class, and began their revolt as a protest against the privileges of birth, the insolence of office, and the luxury of prelates feasting on peasants’ tithes. They all agreed in commiserating the lot, and idealizing the character, of the peasant, serf or free. They challenged women to discard their fashions and farthingales, their sentiment and swooning and submissive piety, and summoned them to come and share the exciting life of the emancipated mind and the roaming male. They redefined religion as a divine afflatus in a soul whose genius is part of the creative urge and mystery of the world. They identified nature with God, and concluded that to be natural was to be divine. They took the medieval legend of Faust as a symbol for the intellectual hunger and burning ambition that breaks through all barriers of tradition, convention, morals, or laws. So “Maler Müller,” long before Goethe, wrote a drama, Fausts Leben, “because I early recognized him as a great fellow … who feels all his power, feels the bridle that fate has put upon him, and tries to throw it off, who has the courage to hurl everything down that steps in his way.”93
The enthusiasm and exaggerations of Sturm und Drang marked it as an expression of intellectual adolescence, the voice of a minority condemned to grow up and simmer down. The movement won no popular support, for tradition and the people have always supported each other. Finding themselves without a base in the structure of German life, the Stormers made their peace with the princes, and, like the philosophes, trusted that enlightened rulers would lead the way to intellectual liberation and social reform. Herder, Goethe, and Schiller touched the movement in their youth, withdrew from the consuming fire, clipped their claws and folded their wings, and gratefully accepted the protection of Weimar’s genial dukes.
VIII. THE ARTISTS
The Germans of this age were quite equal to the French and Italians in art. They took baroque from Italy and rococo from France, but they gave Winckelmann and Mengs to Italy, and their expatriates David Roentgen, “Jean” Riesener, and Adam Weisweiler were preferred to French cabinetmakers by French kings and queens; so Louis XVI paid eighty thousand livres for a secrétaire by Roentgen.94 The Residenz at Munich, Frederick’s Neues Palais at Potsdam, and the homes of well-to-do Germans were crowded with massive furniture elaborately carved, until, at the end of this age, a lighter style came in from England’s Chippendale and Sheraton.—The Meissen factories had been injured in the war, but Nymphenburg, Ludwigs-burg, Potsdam, and other centers carried on the arts of porcelain and faïence. German shelves, mantels, tables, and desks smiled with jolly, graceful dancing, singing, kissing figurines.
On a larger scale there was admirable statuary. Martin Klauer made a bust of Goethe in the early Weimar days—eager, bright-eyed, confident.95 Martin’s son Ludwig did not do so well with Schiller;96 better is the Schiller now in a square at Stuttgart, by Johann von Dannecker. Supreme in German sculpture in this age was Johann Gottfried Schadow, who became court sculptor at Berlin in 1788. In 1791 he made a head of Frederick; in 1793 he carved him in full length; in 1816 he cast in bronze a smaller Frederick97—an unforgettable masterpiece. He cast the bronze Quadriga of Victory for the Brandenburg Gate, and achieved an almost classical loveliness in the marble group of Crown Princess Luise and her sister Friederike.
Germany had so many painters that she could afford to surrender a dozen of them to Italy and still have good ones left. Tischbeins were so numerous in the brotherhood of the brush that we can confuse them with ease. Johann Heinrich Tischbein, painter to the court of Hesse-Cassel, made a fine portrait of Lessing. His nephew Johann Friedrich Tischbein painted in Cassel, Rome, Naples, Paris, Vienna, The Hague, Dessau, Leipzig, and St. Petersburg, and made a charming group of the children of Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar. Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein lived in Italy 1787-99, painted a famous picture, Goethe in the Roman Campagna, and returned to be court painter to the Duke of Oldenburg.
One source of the German Drang nach Italien was Adam Friedrich Oeser, sculptor, painter, etcher, teacher, champion of art reform on classic lines; Winckelmann lived with him for a time in Dresden, criticized his drawing, admired his character, and said, “He knows as much as one can know outside of Italy.”98 In 1764 Oeser was made director of the art academy at Leipzig; Goethe visited him there, and caught the Italian fever.
Of those artists who remained in Germany Daniel Chodowiecki led the list, and he was a Pole. Born in Danzig, left an orphan, he learned to support himself by drawings, engravings, and paintings. In 1743 he moved to Berlin, and became German in all but name. He told the life of Christ in superb miniatures which gave him a national reputation; then, in a more Voltairean mood, he painted Jean Calas and His Family. His drawings were in such demand that for years hardly any major work of literature was published in Prussia without illustrations from his hand. In the finest of his etchings he sketched his own household: himself at work, his wife proudly surveying her five children, the walls covered with art. With a red crayon he drew the figure of Lotte Kestner, whom Goethe loved and lost. In his work there is a grace of line and a tenderness of feeling that distinguish him from Hogarth, to whom he was often compared because of his many pictures of common life; but he rightly deprecated such a correlation. Often he was inspired by Watteau; A Gathering in the Zoological Garden 99 has Watteau’s flair for the open air and the entrancing swirl of feminine robes.
Anton Graff left a portrait of Chodowiecki100—all smiles and curls and avoirdupois—and a portrait of himself101 looking up from his work but dressed as for a ball. He put more spirit into his lovely portrait of his wife,102 caught the pride of the actress Korona Schröter,103 and glorified with golden raiment the overflowing form of Frau Hofrat Böhme.104
Last of the line in this half century was Asmus Jakob Carstens; who absorbed Winckelmann’s gospel in letter and spirit, and completed the classic revival in German painting. Born in Schleswig, schooled in Copenhagen and Italy, he worked chiefly in Lübeck and Berlin; but he went back to Italy in 1792, and feasted on the remains of ancient sculpture and architecture. He did not know that time had washed away the color from Greek art, leaving only line; so, like Mengs, he reduced his brush to a pencil, and aimed only at perfect form. He was disturbed by the phy
sical imperfections of the models who posed in the studios; he decided to trust to his imagination; and he delighted in picturing Greek gods, and scenes from Greek mythology, as he and Winckelmann conceived them. From these he passed to illustrating Dante and Shakespeare. Always his passion for line and form missed color and life; and even when he achieved an almost Michelangelesque vision of godlike figures, as in The Birth of Light,105 we can only praise him for remembering the Sistine Chapel’s paintings as accurately as Mozart remembered its music. Rome returned his affection, and gave his work (1795) one of the most extensive and celebrated exhibitions that any modern artist had ever received. There, three years later, he died, still only forty-four years old. Art, like sex, can be a consuming fire.
The neoclassic mood dominated the architectural embellishment of Potsdam and Berlin under Frederick the Great. He had begun the Neues Palais in 1755; he did not let the war deter him from the project. Three architects—Büring, Gontard, and Manger—shared in designing it; they mingled classic with baroque in an imposing edifice that recalled the palaces of ancient Rome; and in the interior decoration they rivaled the finest specimens of French rococo. The Französische Kirche, or French Church, in Berlin had a classic portico; Gontard and his pupil Georg Unger added a classic tower (1780-85). Unger augmented the majesty of Berlin with a Königliche Bibliothek, or Royal Library, in 1774-80. The Brandenburger Tor, or Brandenburg Gate, raised by Karl Langhans in 1788-91, was frankly modeled on the Propylaea of the Acropolis; it barely survived the Second World War, but lost the famous Quadriga, the four-horse chariot with which Schadow had crowned it.
Other German cities were minting monuments to house princes, nobles, and cadavers. Frederick’s sister Wilhelmine beautified Bayreuth with a palace of charming rococo (1744-73). At Cassel Simon-Louis du Ry designed (1769 f.) the sumptuous dance hall and Blue Room in the Schloss of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. On the Rhine near Düsseldorf Nikolaus von Pigage built the lordly Schloss Benrath (1755-69); and near Ludwigsburg Philippe de La Guépière raised the pretty Palace of Monrepos (1762-64).