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German literature
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The 18th century
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Johann
Christoph Gottsched
Johann Jakob
Bodmer
Johann Jakob
Breitinger
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
"Nathan
the Wise"
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
Christoph Martin Wieland
Sophie von La
Roche
Johann
Gottfried von Herder
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz
Friedrich Maximilian Klinger
Johann Anton
Leisewitz
Karl Philipp Moritz
Heinrich Jung-Stilling
Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
"Faust"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART
III
Illustrations by Eugene Delacroix and Harry Clarke
Friedrich von Schiller
"Love and
Intrigue"
Jean Paul
Friedrich Hölderlin
"Poems"
Heinrich von
Kleist
Rudolf Erich
Raspe
"The Surprising
Adventures of Baron Munchausen"
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
Immanuel Kant
"Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals"
"THE METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF ETHICS"
"FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS"
"THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON"
"THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON"
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Johann Friedrich Herbart
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The 18th
century
Age of Enlightenment Recovery from the devastating
Thirty Years’ War was reflected in the cultural life
of the Holy Roman Empire and in the various German
states. The era of confessional conflict and war had
come to an end in 1648, but urban culture continued
to decline, and the empire became a country of
innumerable courts. Dependent mostly upon princely
patronage, cultural life became decentralized and
very provincial. By the middle of the 18th century,
however, after decades of exhaustion, stagnation,
and provincialization, a significant cultural and
literary revival occurred that was to provide the
basis of one of Germany’s most exalted literary
periods, the Weimar Classicism of the 1790s
(sometimes called the “age of Goethe”).
Rationalism
This recovery was accompanied by a new understanding
of man’s ability to master nature and by a belief in
his rational capacity to set his own moral course.
Enlightenment optimism envisioned progress as
attainable through education and science. The
foundations of this rationalism were laid in science
by
Sir Isaac
Newton
and in philosophy by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
with his Essais de Théodicée (1710; Theodicy: Essays
on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the
Origin of Evil) and his Monadologie (1714;
Monadology). To Leibniz this was the best of
all possible worlds. He constructed a model for the
universe as an absolutist state with God as the
monarch, or central monad, which all other monads,
including man, reflect and strive to emulate. This
metaphysical model of the universe influenced
European writers from
Voltaire (who
satirized Leibniz in Candide) to
Goethe, who as
late as 1832 represented the protagonist of Faust as
a monad seeking salvation.
During the period
of economic decline in the second half of the 17th
century, the German courts and the educated class
had sought to profit from the progressive
developments in France by adopting not only the
standards of French civilization but also its
language. Leibniz wrote most of his essays in
French or in Latin, which was the language of
university scholarship. Those who wrote in German
needed to free themselves from charges of
provinciality and from foreign dominance.
Considering popular German culture plebeian and
vulgar, the aristocracy read only French literature
and listened to Italian opera. By the 1750s the
effort to demonstrate that German was capable of
literary expression led to a search for roots in
national history and a discovery of an indigenous
German tradition in folk songs and ballads. These
enterprises would serve as models for a national
literature.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
German philosopher and mathematician
born July 1 [June 21, old style], 1646,
Leipzig
died November 14, 1716,
Hannover, Hanover
Main
German philosopher,
mathematician, and political adviser,
important both as a metaphysician and as
a logician and distinguished also for
his independent invention of the
differential and integral calculus.
Early life and education
Leibniz was born into a pious Lutheran
family near the end of the Thirty Years’
War, which had laid Germany in ruins. As
a child, he was educated in the Nicolai
School but was largely self-taught in
the library of his father, who had died
in 1652. At Easter time in 1661, he
entered the University of Leipzig as a
law student; there he came into contact
with the thought of men who had
revolutionized science and
philosophy—men such as Galileo, Francis
Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René
Descartes. Leibniz dreamed of
reconciling—a verb that he did not
hesitate to use time and again
throughout his career—these modern
thinkers with the Aristotle of the
Scholastics. His baccalaureate thesis,
De Principio Individui (“On the
Principle of the Individual”), which
appeared in May 1663, was inspired
partly by Lutheran nominalism (the
theory that universals have no reality
but are mere names) and emphasized the
existential value of the individual, who
is not to be explained either by matter
alone or by form alone but rather by his
whole being (entitate tota). This notion
was the first germ of the future
“monad.” In 1666 he wrote De Arte
Combinatoria (“On the Art of
Combination”), in which he formulated a
model that is the theoretical ancestor
of some modern computers: all reasoning,
all discovery, verbal or not, is
reducible to an ordered combination of
elements, such as numbers, words,
sounds, or colours.
After completing his legal studies in
1666, Leibniz applied for the degree of
doctor of law. He was refused because of
his age and consequently left his native
city forever. At Altdorf—the university
town of the free city of Nürnberg—his
dissertation De Casibus Perplexis (“On
Perplexing Cases”) procured him the
doctor’s degree at once, as well as the
immediate offer of a professor’s chair,
which, however, he declined. During his
stay in Nürnberg, he met Johann
Christian, Freiherr von Boyneburg, one
of the most distinguished German
statesmen of the day. Boyneburg took him
into his service and introduced him to
the court of the prince elector, the
archbishop of Mainz, Johann Philipp von
Schönborn, where he was concerned with
questions of law and politics.
King Louis XIV of France was a growing
threat to the German Holy Roman Empire.
To ward off this danger and divert the
King’s interests elsewhere, the
Archbishop hoped to propose to Louis a
project for an expedition into Egypt;
because he was using religion as a
pretext, he expressed the hope that the
project would promote the reunion of the
church. Leibniz, with a view toward this
reunion, worked on the Demonstrationes
Catholicae. His research led him to
situate the soul in a point—this was new
progress toward the monad—and to develop
the principle of sufficient reason
(nothing occurs without a reason). His
meditations on the difficult theory of
the point were related to problems
encountered in optics, space, and
movement; they were published in 1671
under the general title Hypothesis
Physica Nova (“New Physical
Hypothesis”). He asserted that movement
depends, as in the theory of the German
astronomer Johannes Kepler, on the
action of a spirit (God).
In 1672 the Elector sent the young
jurist on a mission to Paris, where he
arrived at the end of March. In
September, Leibniz met with Antoine
Arnauld, a Jansenist theologian
(Jansenism was a nonorthodox Roman
Catholic movement that spawned a
rigoristic form of morality) known for
his writings against the Jesuits.
Leibniz sought Arnauld’s help for the
reunion of the church. He was soon left
without protectors by the deaths of
Freiherr von Boyneburg in December 1672
and of the Elector of Mainz in February
1673; he was now, however, free to
pursue his scientific studies. In search
of financial support, he constructed a
calculating machine and presented it to
the Royal Society during his first
journey to London, in 1673.
Late in 1675 Leibniz laid the
foundations of both integral and
differential calculus. With this
discovery, he ceased to consider time
and space as substances—another step
closer to monadology. He began to
develop the notion that the concepts of
extension and motion contained an
element of the imaginary, so that the
basic laws of motion could not be
discovered merely from a study of their
nature. Nevertheless, he continued to
hold that extension and motion could
provide a means for explaining and
predicting the course of phenomena.
Thus, contrary to Descartes, Leibniz
held that it would not be contradictory
to posit that this world is a
well-related dream. If visible movement
depends on the imaginary element found
in the concept of extension, it can no
longer be defined by simple local
movement; it must be the result of a
force. In criticizing the Cartesian
formulation of the laws of motion, known
as mechanics, Leibniz became, in 1676,
the founder of a new formulation, known
as dynamics, which substituted kinetic
energy for the conservation of movement.
At the same time, beginning with the
principle that light follows the path of
least resistance, he believed that he
could demonstrate the ordering of nature
toward a final goal or cause.
The Hanoverian period
Leibniz
continued his work but was still without
an income-producing position. By October
1676, however, he had accepted a
position in the employment of John
Frederick, the duke of
Braunschweig-Lüneburg. John Frederick, a
convert to Catholicism from Lutheranism
in 1651, had become duke of Hanover in
1665. He appointed Leibniz librarian,
but, beginning in February 1677, Leibniz
solicited the post of councillor, which
he was finally granted in 1678. It
should be noted that, among the great
philosophers of his time, he was the
only one who had to earn a living. As a
result, he was always a
jack-of-all-trades to royalty.
Trying to make himself useful in all
ways, Leibniz proposed that education be
made more practical, that academies be
founded; he worked on hydraulic presses,
windmills, lamps, submarines, clocks,
and a wide variety of mechanical
devices; he devised a means of
perfecting carriages and experimented
with phosphorus. He also developed a
water pump run by windmills, which
ameliorated the exploitation of the
mines of the Harz Mountains, and he
worked in these mines as an engineer
frequently from 1680 to 1685. Leibniz is
considered to be among the creators of
geology because of the observations he
compiled there, including the hypothesis
that the Earth was at first molten.
These many occupations did not stop his
work in mathematics: In March 1679 he
perfected the binary system of
numeration (i.e., using two as a base),
and at the end of the same year he
proposed the basis for analysis situs,
now known as general topology, a branch
of mathematics that deals with selected
properties of collections of related
physical or abstract elements. He was
also working on his dynamics and his
philosophy, which was becoming
increasingly anti-Cartesian. At this
point, Duke John Frederick died on Jan.
7, 1680, and his brother, Ernest
Augustus I, succeeded him.
France was growing more intolerant at
home—from 1680 to 1682 there were harsh
persecutions of the Protestants that
paved the way for the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes on Oct. 18, 1685—and
increasingly menacing on its frontiers,
for as early as 1681, despite the
reigning peace, Louis XIV took
Strasbourg and laid claim to 10 cities
in Alsace. France was thus becoming a
real danger to the empire, which had
already been shaken on the east by a
Hungarian revolt and by the advance of
the Turks, who had been stopped only by
the victory of John III Sobieski, king
of Poland, at the siege of Vienna in
1683. Leibniz served both his prince and
the empire as a patriot. He suggested to
his prince a means of increasing the
production of linen and proposed a
process for the desalinization of water;
he recommended classifying the archives
and wrote, in both French and Latin, a
violent pamphlet against Louis XIV.
During this same period Leibniz
continued to perfect his metaphysical
system through research into the notion
of a universal cause of all being,
attempting to arrive at a starting point
that would reduce reasoning to an
algebra of thought. He also continued
his developments in mathematics; in 1681
he was concerned with the proportion
between a circle and a circumscribed
square and, in 1684, with the resistance
of solids. In the latter year he
published Nova Methodus pro Maximis et
Minimis (“New Method for the Greatest
and the Least”), which was an exposition
of his differential calculus.
Leibniz’ noted Meditationes de
Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis
(Reflections on Knowledge, Truth, and
Ideas) appeared at this time and defined
his theory of knowledge: things are not
seen in God—as Nicolas Malebranche
suggested—but rather there is an
analogy, a strict relation, between
God’s ideas and man’s, an identity
between God’s logic and man’s. In
February 1686, Leibniz wrote his
Discours de métaphysique (Discourse on
Metaphysics). In the March publication
of Acta, he disclosed his dynamics in a
piece entitled Brevis Demonstratio
Erroris Memorabilis Cartesii et Aliorum
Circa Legem Naturae (“Brief
Demonstration of the Memorable Error of
Descartes and Others About the Law of
Nature”). A further development of
Leibniz’ views, revealed in a text
written in 1686 but long unpublished,
was his generalization concerning
propositions that in every true
affirmative proposition, whether
necessary or contingent, the predicate
is contained in the notion of the
subject. It can be said that, at this
time, with the exception of the word
monad (which did not appear until 1695),
his philosophy of monadology was
defined.
In 1685 Leibniz was named historian for
the House of Brunswick and, on this
occasion, Hofrat (“court adviser”). His
job was to prove, by means of genealogy,
that the princely house had its origins
in the House of Este, an Italian
princely family, which would allow
Hanover to lay claim to a ninth
electorate. In search of these
documents, Leibniz began travelling in
November 1687. Going by way of southern
Germany, he arrived in Austria, where he
learned that Louis XIV had once again
declared a state of war; in Vienna, he
was well received by the Emperor; he
then went to Italy. Everywhere he went,
he met scientists and continued his
scholarly work, publishing essays on the
movement of celestial bodies and on the
duration of things. He returned to
Hanover in mid-July 1690. His efforts
had not been in vain. In October 1692
Ernest Augustus obtained the electoral
investiture.
Until the end of his life, Leibniz
continued his duties as historian. He
did not, however, restrict himself to a
genealogy of the House of Brunswick; he
enlarged his goal to a history of the
Earth, which included such matters as
geological events and descriptions of
fossils. He searched by way of monuments
and linguistics for the origins and
migrations of peoples; then for the
birth and progress of the sciences,
ethics, and politics; and, finally, for
the elements of a historia sacra. In
this project of a universal history,
Leibniz never lost sight of the fact
that everything interlocks. Even though
he did not succeed in writing this
history, his effort was influential
because he devised new combinations of
old ideas and invented totally new ones.
In 1691 Leibniz was named librarian at
Wolfenbüttel and propagated his
discoveries by means of articles in
scientific journals. In 1695 he
explained a portion of his dynamic
theory of motion in the Système nouveau
(“New System”), which treated the
relationship of substances and the
preestablished harmony between the soul
and the body: God does not need to bring
about man’s action by means of his
thoughts, as Malebranche asserted, or to
wind some sort of watch in order to
reconcile the two; rather, the Supreme
Watchmaker has so exactly matched body
and soul that they correspond—they give
meaning to each other—from the
beginning. In 1697, De Rerum
Originatione (On the Ultimate Origin of
Things) tried to prove that the ultimate
origin of things can be none other than
God. In 1698, De Ipsa Natura (“On Nature
Itself”) explained the internal activity
of nature in terms of Leibniz’ theory of
dynamics.
All of these writings opposed
Cartesianism, which was judged to be
damaging to faith. Plans for the
creation of German academies followed in
rapid succession. With the help of the
electress Sophia Charlotte, daughter of
Ernest Augustus and soon to become the
first queen of Prussia (January 1701),
the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin
was founded on July 11, 1700.
On Jan. 23, 1698, Ernest Augustus died,
and his son, George Louis, succeeded
him. Leibniz found himself confronted
with an uneducated, boorish prince, a
reveller who kept him in the background.
Leibniz took advantage of every pretext
to leave Hanover; he was constantly on
the move; his only comfort lay in his
friendship with Sophia Charlotte and her
mother, Princess Sophia. Once again, he
set to work on the reunion of the
church: in Berlin, it was a question of
uniting the Lutherans and the
Calvinists; in Paris, he had to subdue
Bishop Bénigne Bossuet’s opposition; in
Vienna (to which Leibniz returned in
1700) he enlisted the support of the
Emperor, which carried great weight; in
England, it was the Anglicans who needed
convincing.
The death in England of William, duke of
Gloucester, in 1700 made George Louis,
great-grandson of James I, a possible
heir to the throne. It fell to Leibniz,
jurist and historian, to develop his
arguments concerning the rights of the
House of Braunschweig-Lüneburg with
respect to this succession.
The War of the Spanish Succession began
in March 1701 and did not come to a
close until September 1714, with the
Treaty of Baden. Leibniz followed its
episodes as a patriot hostile to Louis
XIV. His fame as a philosopher and
scientist had by this time spread all
over Europe; he was named a foreign
member by the Academy of Sciences of
Paris in 1700 and was in correspondence
with most of the important European
scholars of the day. If he was
publishing little at this point, it was
because he was writing Théodicée, which
was published in 1710. In this work he
set down his ideas on divine justice.
Leibniz was impressed with the qualities
of the Russian tsar Peter the Great, and
in October 1711 the ruler received him
for the first time. Following this, he
stayed in Vienna until September 1714,
and during this time the Emperor
promoted him to the post of Reichhofrat
(“adviser to the empire”) and gave him
the title of Freiherr (“baron”). About
this time he wrote the Principes de la
nature et de la Grâce fondés en raison,
which inaugurated a kind of
preestablished harmony between these two
orders. Further, in 1714 he wrote the
Monadologia, which synthesized the
philosophy of the Théodicée. In August
1714, the death of Queen Anne brought
George Louis to the English throne under
the name of George I. Returning to
Hanover, where he was virtually placed
under house arrest, Leibniz set to work
once again on the Annales Imperii
Occidentis Brunsvicenses (1843–46;
“Braunschweig Annals of the Western
Empire”). At Bad-Pyrmont, he met with
Peter the Great for the last time in
June 1716. From that point on, he
suffered greatly from gout and was
confined to his bed until his death.
Leibniz was a man of medium height with
a stoop, broad-shouldered but
bandy-legged, as capable of thinking for
several days sitting in the same chair
as of travelling the roads of Europe
summer and winter. He was an
indefatigable worker, a universal letter
writer (he had more than 600
correspondents), a patriot and
cosmopolitan, a great scientist, and one
of the most powerful spirits of Western
civilization.
Yvon Belaval
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Early
Enlightenment
The first literary reforms in Germany between 1724
and 1740, however, were based on French 17th-century
Classicism. Its primary proponent was Johann
Christoph Gottsched, a professor at Leipzig
whose Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst vor die
Deutschen (1730; “Essay on a German Critical Poetic
Theory”) provided examples for German writers to
follow. Gottsched’s principal criterion for
the production and reception of literature was
reason. Basing his precepts on a literal
interpretation of
Aristotle’s
Poetics, he argued that Nature was governed
by reason and that it was the task of poets to
imitate reason as it manifested itself in Nature. He
also initiated a reform of the German theatre aimed
on the one hand against the Baroque extravagance of
the aristocratic theatre and on the other against
the vulgarity of popular theatre. He introduced
tragedies and comedies conforming to the models of
French Classicism, and he expelled from the stage
the popular figure of the clown along with the
clown’s crude jokes and ad-libbing. In addition,
Gottsched edited some of the first German
moral weeklies (so called because they were
published for the moral edification of the middle
class), which were patterned after English models
such as The Spectator and The Tatler. While the
plays of French Classicism, written for the court
theatre, proved uncongenial to the German middle
class, the moral weeklies provided acceptable
reading material for Gottsched’s audience and
contributed to the establishment of a middle-class
public opinion.
Gottsched’s
derivative, rule-governed poetics made him an
unlikely candidate for founder of modern German
literature. He functioned, instead, as the barrier
to be overcome. Opposition arose on various fronts.
Basing their arguments on
John Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
two Swiss critics,
Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob
Breitinger, called for a stronger emphasis on
imagination in literary production: something
virtually ruled out by Gottsched’s mechanical
recipes for writing poetry. With the first cantos of
his epic poem Der Messias (1748; The Messiah),
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
succeeded in re-creating the visionary heroism of
Milton’s
theological epics in a German poem on the life of
Christ. It created a sensation in 1748, more by its
poetic language and bold images than by its theme.
Johann Christoph Gottsched
born Feb. 2, 1700, Judithenkirch,
near Königsberg, Prussia [now
Kaliningrad, Russia]
died Dec. 12, 1766, Leipzig, Saxony
[Germany]
literary theorist, critic, and
dramatist who introduced French
18th-century classical standards of
taste into the literature and theatre of
Germany.
After studying at Königsberg,
Gottsched was appointed professor of
poetry at the University of Leipzig in
1730, becoming professor of logic and
metaphysics there in 1734.
Earlier, in 1725 and 1726, Gottsched
had published Die vernünftigen
Tadlerinnen (“The Reasonable Female
Critics”), a journal aimed at improving
the intellectual and moral standards of
women. A second journal, Der Biedermann
(1727–29; “The Honest Man”), undertook
the broader task of introducing the new
rationalist creed to German letters. In
1730 he brought out his most important
theoretical work, Versuch einer
kritischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen
(“Essay on a German Critical Poetic
Theory”), the first German treatise on
the art of poetry to apply the standards
of reason and good taste advocated by
Nicolas Boileau, the foremost exponent
of classicism in France.
Gottsched’s poetic theory, which was
circumscribed largely by artificial
rules, proved to have little lasting
influence upon later German literature.
His most enduring achievement resulted
from his collaboration with the actress
Caroline Neuber, which led to the
establishment of the Leipzig school of
acting and criticism. Following
classicist models, they effectively
transformed the nature of the German
theatre from a type of low
entertainment, delighting in coarse
sensual appeal, into a respected vehicle
for serious literary effort. Gottsched’s
Deutsche Schaubühne, 6 vol. (1741–45;
“German Theatre”), containing chiefly
translations from the French, provided
the German stage with a classical
repertory to replace the improvisations
and melodramas previously popular. His
own dramatic efforts (e.g., Sterbender
Cato [1732; “The Dying Cato”]), however,
are considered to be little more than
mediocre tragedies in the classical
style. His concern for style, advanced
by his Ausführliche Redekunst (1736;
“Complete Rhetoric”) and Grundlegung
einer deutschen Sprachkunst (1748;
“Foundation of a German Literary
Language”), helped to regularize German
as a literary language.
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Johann Jakob Bodmer
born July 19, 1698, Greifensee,
Switz.
died Jan. 2, 1783, near Zürich
Swiss historian, professor, and critical
writer who contributed to the
development of an original German
literature in Switzerland.
Bodmer taught Helvetian history at
the Zürich grammar school from 1725
until 1775 and from 1737 was a member of
the Grosser Rat (cantonal legislature).
In conjunction with others, he published
(1721–23) Die Discourse der Mahlern, a
weekly journal after the model of The
Spectator. His most important writings
are the treatises Von dem Einfluss und
Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Kraft (1727),
Von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie
(1740), and Critische Betrachtungen über
die poetischen Gemälde der Dichter
(1741), in which he pleaded for freeing
the literary imagination from the
restrictions imposed upon it by French
Neoclassicism. Bodmer also engaged in
studies of William Shakespeare, Torquato
Tasso, Dante, and Miguel de Cervantes;
translated Homer (in hexameters);
espoused the causes of Montesquieu and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and thus played a
part in European literature as a
precursor of Johann Gottfried von
Herder. In his own country he was an
influential national educator. As a poet
he was unsuccessful.
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Johann Jakob Breitinger
born March 1, 1701, Zürich, Switz.
died Dec. 13, 1776, Zürich
Swiss-German writer, one of the most
influential 18th-century literary
critics in the German-speaking world.
He studied theology and became
professor at the Collegium Carolinum in
Zürich. He lectured on Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, logic, and rhetoric; showed
excellence as a philologist in many
editions; and advocated education on
humanist lines (Zürich school reform,
1765–75).
Under the inspiration of The
Spectator papers of England’s Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele, Breitinger
founded and wrote essays for the weekly
Discourse der Mahlern (1721–23). In
Critische Dichtkunst (1740), one of the
most important of his many publications,
he attacked the narrowly rationalist
Dichtkunst (1730) of the Leipzig
“literary pope” Johann Christoph
Gottsched. Breitinger stressed the place
of the imagination and the wonderful in
poetry; fired the German-speaking public
with enthusiasm for Homer; and spread
the ideas of John Locke, Lord
Shaftesbury, and Alexander Pope. He was
visited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and others, and his pupils included the
poet and prose writer Johann Kaspar
Lavater and the writer and educator
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.
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Enlightenment
Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing
The major representative of the Enlightenment in
German literature was
Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. He surmounted Gottsched’s
strictures, declaring in 1759, in Briefe, die
neueste Literatur betreffend, Nr. 17 (“Letters
Concerning the Newest Literature, No. 17”), “Nobody
will deny that the German stage owes a great share
of its early improvement to Professor Gottsched. I
am this Nobody!” It was Lessing who became, through
his own impressive output of plays and theoretical
writings for the theatre, the founder of modern
German literature. Interestingly enough, he urged
the story of Faust on his contemporaries as a
subject particularly appropriate to the German
stage.
With his play Miss
Sara Sampson (1755),
Lessing
also introduced to the German stage a new genre: the
bürgerliches Trauerspiel (“bourgeois tragedy”). It
demonstrated that tragedy need not be limited to the
highborn, as Gottsched had maintained in his
interpretation of
Aristotle’s
Poetics.
Lessing
reinterpreted
Aristotle in
his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–69; Hamburg
Dramaturgy), asserting that the cathartic emotions
of pity and fear are felt by the audience rather
than by figures in the drama. With this stress on
pity and on compassion,
Lessing
interpreted
Aristotle in
terms of Christian middle-class virtues and
established Shakespeare as the model for German
dramatists to follow. According to
Lessing,
Shakespeare’s
tragedies arouse fear, pity, and compassion more
successfully than the dramas of French Classicism.
In Emilia Galotti (1772), his major “bourgeois
tragedy,”
Lessing
adapted the Roman legend of Virginia to the setting
of 18th-century absolutism: a father is forced to
kill his own daughter in order to protect her from
seduction by an absolutist prince. This obvious
indictment of a political system escaped
contemporary audiences but inspired the later
dramatists of the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and
Stress”) movement, which exalted nature and human
feeling and individualism.
In Minna von
Barnhelm (1767),
Lessing’s
most successful comedy, he deals with love and
honour in 18th-century Prussia. The play shows the
protagonists’ emancipation from the Prussian code of
honour and from societal conventions of marriage.
Lessing’s
lighthearted yet profound questioning of severe
codes made his play the first work in German
literature with a significant contemporary content.
His final,
blank-verse drama, Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan
the Wise), is representative of the Enlightenment.
Set in 12th-century Jerusalem during the Crusades,
the play deals with religious tolerance. The
dramatic conflicts are oriented to the conflicts of
the three religions involved—Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam—and coalesce in the love of a Knight
Templar for the daughter of Nathan, the wise Jew who
embodies the ideal of humanity. At the core of the
play is the parable of the ring that Nathan offers
as an answer to the question of which of the three
religions is the true one. A father has one precious
ring but three sons whom he loves equally. To avoid
favouring one son, he obtains two identical copies
of the ring, but only the “genuine” ring has the
power to make its possessor beloved of God and men.
The brothers are advised to prove through their
actions which of the three received the original
ring. The parable implies that Christians, Jews, and
Muslims are involved like the three brothers in a
competition to prove by ethical conduct—rather than
by prejudice, warfare, and bickering over dogma—the
truth of their respective religions. With this play
Lessing
was far ahead of his time, not only in terms of
religious tolerance but also in his dramatic
subversion of one of the stereotypes of European
religious anti-Semitism: the evil Jew and his
beautiful daughter.
Lessing’s
use of a wise Jew was a tribute to his friend Moses
Mendelssohn, a philosopher who was the central
figure of German Jewish emancipation.
Nathan der Weise
shows that
Lessing
was involved in one of the central theological
debates about religious revelation in 18th-century
Germany, a debate in which he yielded neither to
orthodoxy nor to superficial rationalism. The play
was first conceived as a religious statement
opposing Protestant orthodoxy rather than as a stage
play, but the censorship that threatened to curtail
Lessing’s
long drawn-out polemics against dogmatic Protestant
theologians encouraged him to make it a powerful
drama. He never expected the play to be staged.
Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing
"Nathan
the Wise"
German author
born Jan. 22, 1729, Kamenz, Upper Lusatia, Saxony [Germany]
died Feb. 15, 1781, Braunschweig, Brunswick [Germany]
Main
German dramatist, critic, and writer on philosophy and aesthetics. He
helped free German drama from the influence of classical and French
models and wrote plays of lasting importance. His critical essays
greatly stimulated German letters and combated conservative dogmatism
and cant while affirming religious and intellectual tolerance and the
unbiased search for truth.
Education and first dramatic works.
Lessing’s father, a highly respected theologian, was hard put to support
his large family even though he occupied the position of pastor
primarius (chief pastor). At the age of 12, Lessing, even then an avid
reader, entered the famous Fürstenschule (“elector’s school”) of St.
Afra, in Meissen. A gifted and eager student, Lessing acquired a good
knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, while his admiration for the
plays of the Latin dramatists Plautus and Terence fired him with the
ambition to write comedies himself.
In the autumn of 1746 Lessing entered the University of Leipzig as a
student of theology. His real interests, however, lay toward literature,
philosophy, and art. Lessing became fascinated by the theatre in
Leipzig, which had recently been revitalized by the work of a talented
and energetic actress, Caroline Neuber. Neuber took an interest in the
young poet and in 1748 successfully produced his comedy Der junge
Gelehrte (“The Young Scholar”). The play is a delightful satire on an
arrogant, superficial, vain, and easily offended scholar, a figure
through which Lessing mocked his own bookishness. The other comedies
belonging to this Leipzig period of 1747–49 (Damon, Die alte Jungfer
[“The Old Maid”], Der Misogyn [“The Misogynist”], Die Juden [“The
Jews”], Der Freigeist [“The Free Thinker”]) are witty commentaries on
human weaknesses—bigotry, prejudice, nagging, fortune hunting,
matchmaking, intrigue, hypocrisy, corruption, and frivolity. Set against
this background are virtuous men and women who are considerate and
selfless, sensitive and helpful, forthright, and faithful in love. In
Die Juden Lessing praised unappreciated nobility of mind and thus struck
a blow against bigotry toward the Jews at a time when they were still
confined to a ghetto life. Lessing had set himself the goal of becoming
the German Molière: in these comedies he most interestingly begins to
draw his characters as recognizable individuals, breaking away from the
traditional dramatic “types.”
Early in 1748 Lessing’s parents, who disapproved of his association
with the theatre in Leipzig, summoned him home. But he managed to win
their consent to begin studying medicine and was soon allowed to return
to Leipzig. He quickly found himself in difficulties because he had
generously stood surety for some members of the Neuber company—although
himself heavily in debt. When the company folded, he fled from Leipzig
in order to avoid being arrested for debt. He eventually reached Berlin
in 1748, where he hoped to find work as a journalist through his cousin
Mylius, who was by this time an established editor. In the next four
years he undertook a variety of jobs, mainly translating French and
English historical and philosophical works into German. But he also
began to make a name for himself through his brilliant and witty
criticism for the Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung, on which he was
book review editor. He also launched a periodical of his own, Beiträge
zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (“Contributions to the History
and Improvement of the Theatre”), which was discontinued in 1750.
Rising reputation as dramatist and critic.
From 1751 to 1752 Lessing was in Wittenberg, where he took his degree in
medicine. He then returned to Berlin, where he started another
periodical, Theatralische Bibliothek (“Theatrical Library”), but this
too had to be closed down after only four volumes. The most significant
event during this time was the publication in 1753–55 of a six-volume
edition of his works. Apart from some witty epigrams, the edition
contained the most important of his Leipzig comedies. It also contained
Miss Sara Sampson, which is the first major bürgerliches Trauerspiel, or
domestic tragedy, in German literature. Middle-class writers had long
wanted to do away with the traditional class distinctions in literature,
whereby heroic and tragic themes were played out by aristocratic
figures, while middle-class characters appeared only in comedy. Lessing
was, in fact, not the first German writer to challenge this tradition,
but it is fair to say that his play marks the decisive break with the
classical French drama that still dominated the German stage. Miss Sara
Sampson was inspired by George Lillo’s London Merchant (1731) and by the
novels of Samuel Richardson—with their praise of middle-class feminine
virtue—and, to a lesser degree, by the sentimental comédie larmoyante
(“tearful comedy”), originated in France by the early 18th-century
dramatist Pierre-Claude de La Chausée. It is the first German play in
which bürgerlich (middle-class) characters bear the full burden of a
tragic fate, and it had its successful premiere at Frankfurt an der Oder
in 1755. Its reflective prose skillfully lays bare the psychology of the
situation—a conflict between the demands of virtue and the heart,
between conscience and passion—and its characters are finely drawn. The
plot centres on an innocent, sensitive heroine of a bourgeois family;
she becomes the victim of Lady Marwood, her vampirelike rival in love,
who disregards all restraints and inhibitions, and of Mellefont, a weak
man who vacillates between the two women but finally atones for his
guilt by his death.
Characteristic of Lessing’s writings at this period is his Rettungen
(“Vindications”), which is outstanding for its incisive style and
clarity of argument. In its four essays he aimed to defend independent
thinkers such as the Reformation-period writers Johannes Cochlaeus and
Gerolamo Cardano, who had been unjustly slandered and persecuted. His
scintillating and biting polemic Ein Vade Mecum für den Herrn Samuel
Gotthold Lange (1754) was directed against the carelessly corrupt
translations of the poetry of Horace by the arrogant scholar S.G. Lange,
whose literary reputation was demolished by Lessing’s attack. From this
point on, Lessing was justly feared as a literary adversary who used his
command of style as a finely honed weapon. The philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn and the writer and publisher C.F. Nicolai stand out among
Lessing’s Berlin friends. With these men Lessing conducted a truly
epoch-making correspondence (Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, 1756–57;
“Correspondence About Tragedy”) on the aesthetic of tragic drama.
Tragedy, Lessing maintained, should not preach morality but rather
should arouse admiration and pity in the audience as evidence of
emotional involvement.
Between November 1755 and April 1758 Lessing lived again at Leipzig,
but in May he moved back to Berlin. There he contributed regularly to
Nicolai’s weekly, Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (“Letters
Concerning the Latest Literature”), writing a number of essays on
contemporary literature. The central point of these was a vigorous
attack on the influential theatre critic J.C. Gottsched for his advocacy
of a theatre modeled on French drama, especially that of the
17th-century tragedian Pierre Corneille. Lessing maintained that the
courtly, mannered drama of France was alien to the German mentality.
Instead, he demanded a truly national drama, belonging to the people,
based on faithfulness to nature and reality. He urged German playwrights
to take Shakespeare as their model. In the 17th Literaturbrief he
published a stirring scene from his own fragmentary Faust drama. In this
scene, Lessing sketches out a “Faust without evil” whose relentless
spirit of inquiry is justified before God, notwithstanding his pact with
the devil. He thus paved the way for his young contemporary Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and his great dramatic version of the Faust story.
In 1759 Lessing published some masterly prose fables, largely social
criticism, and with them an essay on the fable form itself, in which he
formulated the particular laws of the genre by analyzing its didactic
and allegorical structure.
In 1760 Lessing went to Breslau as secretary to General Tauentzien,
the military governor of Silesia. Lessing’s studies in philosophy and
aesthetics there brought forth two important literary works. One is the
great treatise Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie
(1766; “Laocoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry”). Here he
took issue with the contemporary art historian Johann Winckelmann,
specifically over his interpretation of the “Laocoon,” a famous
sculpture of Hellenistic times (c. 1st century bc), which shows the
priest Laocoon and his sons as they are about to be killed by the
serpents that hold them entwined. In the Laokoon Lessing attempted to
fundamentally define the separate functions of painting and of poetry.
He pointed out that whereas painting is bound to observe spatial
proximity—and must, therefore, select and render the seminal and most
expressive moment in a chain of events—poetry has the task of depicting
an event organically and in its temporal sequence. The essence of poetry
thus lies not in description but in the representation of the
transitory, of movement.
The second great Breslau work is Minna von Barnhelm (1767), which
marks the birth of classical German comedy. Goethe was to praise it for
its contemporary relevance and for its central theme (the struggle
between Prussia and Saxony in the Seven Years’ War), which was an event
of national significance. The central characters are a Prussian officer,
Major Tellheim, and a young gentlewoman from Thuringia, Minna. The
upright officer’s conscientiousness and rigid interpretation of the code
of honour has endangered his relationship with Minna. Charming and
spirited, Minna takes matters into her own hands and, prompted by her
heart’s perceptions, resolutely overcomes the obstacles that war and
occupation have placed in the way of their union. She resolves the
conflict between the claims of conscience and those of happiness. Thus,
in thinking and acting like true representatives of the Enlightenment,
the two eventually behave like ordinary people and so bear witness to
Lessing’s concept of humanity. The two protagonists are supported by
forcefully drawn secondary characters. Lessing’s dialogue enhances a
lively dramatic action that still today commands the attention of
theatre audiences.
On returning to Berlin in 1765 Lessing applied for the post of
director of the royal library; but since he had quarreled with Voltaire,
who lived as a favourite at Frederick the Great’s court, the king (who
in any case thought little of German authors) rejected his application.
Lessing then accepted the offer of some Hamburg merchants to act as
adviser and critic in their privately funded venture of a national
theatre. Within a year, however, the project collapsed, and Lessing
recognized with some bitterness that the time for a German national
theatre was not yet ripe. Even so, his reviews of more than 50
performances were published, in the form of 104 brief essays on basic
principles of the drama, under the title of Hamburgische Dramaturgie
(1767–69). Here, too, Lessing argued against tragedy modeled on that of
Corneille and Voltaire, although he praised the realism of the
contemporary French writer Denis Diderot’s descriptions of middle-class
life. Lessing interpreted Aristotle’s concept of tragic catharsis
(purging) as meaning the emotional release that follows tension
generated in spectators who witness tragic events; he concludes that the
sensations evoked by pity and fear should afterward exert a moral
influence on the audience by being transformed into virtuous action. In
1768–69 he published Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts (“Letters of
Antiquarian Content”), an attack on the pretentious learning and elitist
attitudes of the Halle professor C.A. Klotz. Another result of this
dispute was the lucid and perceptive essay Wie die Alten den Tod
gebildet (“How the Ancients Depicted Death”).
Final years at Wolfenbüttel.
Being extremely poor, in 1770 Lessing had no choice but to accept the
badly paid post of librarian at Wolfenbüttel, which he had earlier
visited in 1766. His years there were unhappy and tempestuous but rich
in achievement. His tragedy Emilia Galotti was performed in 1772.
Written in intense and incisive prose, this brilliantly constructed play
deals with a conflict of conscience at the court of an Italian prince.
Lessing became involved in perhaps the most bitter controversy of his
career when he also published extracts containing extremely radical
ideas from the papers of the recently deceased biblical critic and
scholar H.S. Reimarus under the title Fragmente eines Ungenannten
(1774–77; “Fragments of an Unknown”). Theologians viewed these
publications as a serious challenge to religious orthodoxy, even though
Lessing himself had taken up a mediating position toward the radical
theses of Reimarus, who had rejected the basic tenets of the Christian
faith. Lessing went into battle against the orthodox clergy, involving
himself in violent controversies with their leader, the chief pastor of
Hamburg, J.M. Goeze. Against this rigid dogmatist, who was a man of
almost pharisaical narrow-mindedness, Lessing launched some of his most
cutting polemics, notably “Anti-Goeze” (1778), in which he expounded his
belief that the search for truth is more valuable than the certainty
gained by clinging to doctrinaire orthodoxy.
This controversy culminated in Nathan der Weise (1779), Lessing’s
“dramatic poem” in iambic pentameter. This is a didactic play of a
theological and philosophical nature, combining ethical profundity with
many comic touches, and is a work of high poetic quality and dramatic
tension. Nathan der Weise symbolizes the equality of three great
religions in regard to their ethical basis, for the play celebrates
man’s true religion—love, acting without prejudice and devoted to the
service of mankind. Among the representatives of the three
religions—Islāmic (Saladin), Christian (the Templar), and Jewish
(Nathan)—only the Jew, in whose character Lessing paid tribute to his
old friend Moses Mendelssohn, lives up to the ideal of full humanity; he
alone is capable of complete self-abnegation and has the courage to
speak the truth even to the mighty. The fact that the main characters
discover in the end that they are blood relatives serves to underscore
their common membership in the larger family of mankind.
Lessing’s last work, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780; The
Education of the Human Race), is a treatise that closely reflects the
working of his mind and expresses his belief in the perfectibility of
the human race. In the history of the world’s religions, Lessing saw a
developing moral awareness that would, he believed, eventually attain
the peak of universal brotherhood and moral freedom that would transcend
all dogmas and doctrines.
Thus the last decade of his life spent at Wolfenbüttel produced a
rich harvest of philosophical and literary works. But his life there was
otherwise full of tribulations. His health had begun to give way, and it
was a lonely existence, with only a few trips to break the monotony. In
October 1776 he had finally been able to marry Eva König, the widow of a
Hamburg merchant and a friend of long standing. In December 1777 she
gave birth to their only child, a son, but he died soon after; she
herself died the following month. Lessing’s last years were lonely and
poor.
Joachim Müller
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Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock and Christoph Martin Wieland
Although known mainly as the author of the epic Der
Messias, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was in
fact the major poet of the German Enlightenment,
liberating lyric poetry from the standing rules and
stressing innovative language, images, and metres.
His alleged discovery of a Germanic genre—the
Bardiet (adapted from barditus, Tacitus’s term for a
Germanic war song, and signifying a lyrical drama of
national content)—was pure fiction, but the occasion
revealed the nationalistic overtones of 18th-century
German literature. Although this nationalism cannot
be compared to that of the 19th and 20th centuries,
it showed the central role of literature in the
formation of German national consciousness.
Christoph Martin
Wieland was the foremost novelist of the German
Enlightenment. He introduced the
Miguel de Cervantes
model of Don Quixote in his Die
Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764; The
Adventures of Don Sylvio von Rosalva) and the
Henry Fielding
model of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews
in his Geschichte des Agathon (1766–67; The History
of Agathon). The hero of each is a visionary dreamer
who, after many failures and erotic temptations,
eventually adopts an enlightened outlook on life.
Another of Wieland’s major contributions was
his prose translation of
Shakespeare
into German, which served as an inspiration to Sturm
und Drang dramatists. Although Wieland’s
novels were forerunners of the bildungsroman, they
missed the temper of the time in Germany by placing
their protagonists in a fictitious Spain or ancient
Greece rather than in 18th-century Germany.
Sophie von La Roche, Wieland’s onetime
fiancée and his protégé, wrote the first woman’s
novel by a German, Geschichte des Fräuleins von
Sternheim (1771; History of Lady Sophia Sternheim);
its female protagonist inhabited contemporary German
and English society.
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
born July 2, 1724, Quedlinburg,
Saxony [Germany]
died March 14, 1803, Hamburg
German epic and lyric poet whose
subjective vision marked a break with
the rationalism that had dominated
German literature in the early 18th
century.
Klopstock was educated at
Schulpforta, a prestigious Protestant
boarding school, where he read John
Milton’s Paradise Lost in the
translation by the influential Swiss
critic Johann Jakob Bodmer. That
experience prompted Klopstock to begin
planning a great religious epic poem. In
1749 the first three cantos of his Der
Messias (The Messiah), written in
unrhymed hexameters, appeared in the
Bremer Beiträge and created a sensation.
To fulfill what he considered his
poetic mission, Klopstock left his
studies at the University of Leipzig and
became a private tutor at Langensalza,
Thuringia. There he fell in love with a
cousin, the “Fanny” of his odes.
Disappointed in romance, he went to
Zürich (1750), staying for six months
with Bodmer.
An invitation and an annuity from
Frederick V of Denmark took him to
Copenhagen, where he remained for 20
years. While there Klopstock composed
historical plays dealing with the
ancient Germanic hero Arminius. In 1754
he married Margarethe (Meta) Moller of
Hamburg, who was the “Cidli” of his
odes. Grief over her early death
affected his creativity. A collection of
his Oden (“Odes”) was published in 1771.
In 1770 he retired to Hamburg, where the
last five cantos of Der Messias were
produced with waning inspiration three
years later. In 1791 he married Johanna
Elisabeth von Winthem, his first wife’s
niece and a close friend for many years.
Although widely known as the author
of Der Messias—the work was translated
into 17 languages—Klopstock established
his reputation chiefly as a lyric poet.
The free verse forms he used in his
hymnlike odes permitted a more natural
and expressive use of language.
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Christoph Martin Wieland
born Sept. 5, 1733, Oberholzheim,
near Biberach [Germany]
died Jan. 20, 1813, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar
poet and man of letters of the German
Rococo period whose work spans the major
trends of his age, from rationalism and
the Enlightenment to classicism and
pre-Romanticism.
Wieland was the son of a Pietist
parson, and his early writings from the
1750s were sanctimonious and strongly
devotional. During the 1760s, however,
he discovered another, more sensual
aspect of his nature and moved toward a
more worldly, rationalistic philosophy.
Although some of Wieland’s work of this
period includes erotic poetry, he began
to find the balance between sensuality
and rationalism that marked his mature
writing. His Geschichte des Agathon, 2
vol. (1766–67; History of Agathon),
which describes the process, is
considered the first Bildungsroman, or
novel of psychological development.
Between 1762 and 1766 Wieland
published the first German translations
of 22 of William Shakespeare’s plays,
which were to be influential models for
Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”)
dramatists. Wieland was professor of
philosophy at Erfurt (1769–72) and was
then appointed tutor to the Weimar
princes. He was not a successful teacher
but spent the rest of his life in or
near the court circle as an admired man
of letters. In 1773 he established Der
teutsche Merkur (“The German Mercury”),
which was a leading literary periodical
for 37 years. Late in life, he
considered himself a classicist and
devoted most of his time to translating
Greek and Roman authors. His allegorical
verse epic Oberon (1780) foreshadows
many aspects of Romanticism.
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Sophie von La Roche
born Dec. 6, 1731, Kaufbeuern,
Bavaria [Germany]
died Feb. 18, 1807, Offenbach, Hesse
German writer whose first and most
important work, Geschichte des Fräuleins
von Sternheim (1771; History of Lady
Sophia Sternheim), was the first German
novel written by a woman and is
considered to be among the best works
from the period in which English novels,
particularly those of Samuel Richardson,
had great influence on many German
writers.
She was engaged to her close friend
and cousin, the well-known writer
Christoph Martin Wieland, but the
betrothal was dissolved, and in 1754 she
married G.M. Franck von La Roche. She
was to become the grandmother of Bettina
von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, both
associated with the Romantic movement.
From 1771 she maintained a literary
salon in Ehrenbreitstein to which the
young J.W. von Goethe belonged. In that
year Wieland edited and published her
first novel. Both its insistent
didacticism and its partially epistolary
form follow English models, but it also
is related to the new phase of fiction
introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; in La Roche’s
novel, passion begins to take a place
beside rational morality and virtue.
Fräulein von Sternheim’s melancholy
moods and the “confessional” aspect lent
to the novel by its letter form won it
fame. This, like all La Roche’s works,
is imbued with the rational spirit of
the Enlightenment and shows her interest
in economic and social problems,
including women’s education.
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Johann Gottfried
von Herder
The temper of the time demanded a concept of German
national identity liberated from the tyranny of Rome
and Paris, and it demanded a literature that would
express this new national self-awareness. Johann
Gottfried von Herder, who had abandoned a
comfortable position as pastor in provincial Riga
(then part of the Russian Empire) on the Baltic Sea
in order to pursue philosophical interests, was a
central figure in this movement. He was a
transitional figure, belonging to the Enlightenment
as well as to the Sturm und Drang movement. His
Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Journal of My
Travels in the Year 1769) is a diary of his ocean
journey from Riga to Nantes, France, and at the same
time an allegory of a progress away from unthinking
German provincialism to the kind of strongly
individualistic rebellion that was to set the tone
for his generation of German intellectuals and
poets. Herder conceived the idea of cultural
relativism and historicism that regards each culture
as possessing a distinct collective identity, an
“ethnic soul” (Volksseele) that allows it to be
studied and judged within its own context. The
existence of a Volksseele, in Herder’s view, creates
national destinies: to realize and perfect the
authentic characteristics of the Volk and prevent
their nature from being lost through ignorance or
foreign dominance. This mission is especially
critical for peoples who have forgotten or abandoned
or not yet found their own identities, and the
latter certainly applied to the Germans in the
mid-18th century, when a German nation-state did not
exist.
Herder’s
theory legitimated the study of folk literature and
privileged its naive but expressive discourse as a
model for 18th-century poetry. It was precisely
popular oral poetry (Volksdichtung) that contained
and defined the Volksseele. While Herder contributed
two seminal essays, on Ossian (the counterfeit
3rd-century Gaelic poet created by James MacPherson)
and on
Shakespeare, to
the volume Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773;
“Concerning German Character and Art”), the Sturm
und Drang manifesto on language and drama, he
continued to support Enlightenment ideas in his
Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1793–97;
“Letters for the Advancement of Humanity”). His
concept of Humanität (“humanism”), reconciling
intellect and feeling, provided continuity between
the Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism.
The major
achievement of the Enlightenment in Germany was the
formation of a public opinion expressing the
concerns of the educated middle class of writers and
readers. The first vehicles of this opinion were the
moral weeklies, which focused on ethical
instruction. Then came the literary periodicals, as
edited by
Lessing and
others; these concentrated on aesthetics. Lastly,
national group enterprises, as manifested in works
such as Von deutscher Art und Kunst, dealt with
national history and national identity. Thus
occurred a development and shift from morals to
aesthetics and, finally, to national concerns.
Johann Gottfried von Herder
born August 25, 1744, Mohrungen, East
Prussia [now Morag, Poland]
died December 18, 1803, Weimar,
Saxe-Weimar [Germany]
German critic, theologian, and
philosopher, who was the leading figure
of the Sturm und Drang literary movement
and an innovator in the philosophy of
history and culture. His influence,
augmented by his contacts with the young
J.W. von Goethe, made him a harbinger of
the Romantic movement. He was ennobled
(with the addition of von) in 1802.
Early life and travels
Herder was the son of poor parents and
attended local schools. Beginning in the
summer of 1762 he studied theology,
philosophy, and literature at
Königsberg, coming into close contact
with Immanuel Kant, the founder of
critical philosophy, as well as with
Johann Georg Hamann, one of the
Enlightenment’s prominent critics.
In November 1764 Herder went to teach
and preach in Riga (then part of the
Russian Empire). There he published his
first works, which included two
collections of fragments, entitled Über
die neuere deutsche Literatur: Fragmente
(1767; “On Recent German Literature:
Fragments”) and Kritische Wälder, oder
Betrachtungen die Wissenschaft und Kunst
des Schönen betreffend (1769 and 1846;
“Critical Forests, or Reflections on the
Science and Art of the Beautiful”).
In the summer of 1769 he set out on
an ocean voyage from Riga to Nantes,
which brought him a deeper understanding
of his destiny. His Journal meiner Reise
im Jahr 1769 (1769; “Journal of My
Voyage in the Year 1769”), completed in
Paris in December, bears witness to the
change that it effected in him. Herder
saw himself as a groundless being who
had left the safe shore and was
journeying into an unknown future. It
became his vocation to unveil that
future through insights gained from the
past, so that its character might be
felt by his contemporaries. Herder’s
prophetic criticisms of his own time
anticipated the possibilities of
intellectual developments generations
ahead, including the ideas of Goethe,
the brothers August Wilhelm and
Friedrich von Schlegel, and Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm in poetical and aesthetic
theory; Wilhelm von Humboldt in the
philosophy of language; G.W.F. Hegel in
the philosophy of history; Wilhelm
Dilthey and his followers in
epistemology; Arnold Gehlen in
anthropology; and the Slav nationalists
in political thought.
During a visit to Strasbourg, where
he arrived in September 1770 as the
companion of Prince Peter Frederick
William of Holstein, Herder experienced
a momentous meeting with the young
Goethe, who was stirred to recognize his
own artistic faculties through Herder’s
observations on Homer, Pindar, William
Shakespeare, and on literature and folk
songs.
Career at Bückeburg
In April 1771 Herder went to Bückeburg
as court preacher. The works that he
produced there were fundamental to the
Sturm und Drang, a literary movement
with Promethean and irrationalist
motifs, without which German Classical
and Romantic literature could not have
arisen. In the Romanticism Herder
espoused, the medium of thought is
feeling (Gefühl), which he compared to
the sense of touch. Whereas sight
apprehends things at a distance, feeling
enjoys an immediate experience of
reality, which it apprehends as a power
reacting against an individual’s own
vital energy. At the same time, however,
the individual experiences his own body,
in which a vital power asserts itself
against the world. At the moment when a
person recognizes the limits imposed by
the environment without becoming
dependent on it, a balance of forces is
achieved between the two in which the
individual body is converted into the
aesthetic gestalt (or integral
structure) and the identification of the
individual with reality is consummated.
Among his works of this period are
Plastik (1778), which outlines his
metaphysics, and Abhandlung über den
Ursprung der Sprache (1772; “Essay on
the Origin of Language”), which finds
the origin of language in human nature.
For Herder, knowledge is possible only
through the medium of language. Although
the individual and the world are united
in feeling, they separate themselves in
consciousness in order to link
themselves anew in the “intentional,” or
object-directed, act in which the
objective meaning of a word is rooted.
Thus, what earlier had been apprehended
dimly but not specifically recognized in
feeling is expressly designated. Feeling
and reflection thus interpenetrate each
other; and the word, being at once sound
and significance, is the cause of this
union. Every signification of something
therefore includes an emotional attitude
toward it that reflects the
particularity and the outlook of its
users. Thus, the structure of language
is a true image of human nature.
Whereas the psychologists of the time
were carefully distinguishing various
human faculties (conation, feeling,
knowledge), Herder stressed the unity
and indivisible wholeness of human
nature. Consciousness and Besonnenheit
(“reflective discernment”) are not
simply “higher” faculties added to an
animal foundation; instead, they
designate the structure of the
individual as a whole with qualitatively
unique human desires and human
sensitivities. Since human instincts and
sensitivities are subject to reflection,
or “broken off” (gebrochen), however,
the human individual is “the first
liberated member of creation.”
Herder’s philosophy of history also
began to take form at this time,
springing from his attempt to use the
past in order to assess the present
situation and future probabilities. He
had already outlined in the Fragmente
the scheme of a typical historical
development on the analogy of the ages
of a man’s life. By this means he tried
to determine the situation of German
poetry that was then current. The essay
on Shakespeare and Auch eine Philosophie
der Geschichte zur Bildung der
Menschheit (1774; “Another Philosophy of
History Concerning the Development of
Mankind”), opposing Rationalism in
historiography, were the first writings
to show a deeper understanding of
historical existence as the product of
the contradiction between individuation
and the whole of history; this
contradiction itself forms the logical
basis of historical development. If two
forces are in conflict, one can be seen
as striving to persevere and to emerge
from the whole as an individual
structure. Yet the whole is not
satisfied with any single form: in
historical catastrophes it frees itself
to shape a new form of things, which is
shattered again in turn when its time is
past. The individual is not only an end
but also a blind, unfree instrument
taken or rejected by God. Even the
philosopher can see the future only by
tracing its conditions from patterns of
past development in order to counteract
it.
Further works prepared during this
period were his Älteste Urkunde des
Menschengeschlechts (1774–76; “Oldest
Records of the Human Race”) on Hebrew
antiquities and his An Prediger:
Fünfzehn Provinzialblätter (1744; “To
Preachers: Fifteen Provincial Papers”).
Two especially important works were his
essay on Shakespeare and “Auszug aus
einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die
Lieder alter Völker” (1773; “Extract
from a Correspondence About Ossian and
the Songs of Ancient Peoples”),
published in a manifesto to which Goethe
and Justus Möser, a forerunner of Sturm
und Drang, also contributed. As Herder
showed in his exposition of Shakespeare
and Homer, in the genuine poetic
utterance, hitherto-hidden aspects of
man’s life are revealed by virtue of the
creative function of language. “A poet
is the creator of the nation around
him,” he wrote, “he gives them a world
to see and has their souls in his hand
to lead them to that world.” Poetic
ability is no special preserve of the
educated; as the true “mother tongue of
mankind” (Hamann), it appears in its
greatest purity and power in the
uncivilized periods of every nation. For
Herder, this ability was proved by the
Old Testament, the Edda, and Homer:
hence Herder’s concern to retrieve
ancient German folk songs and his
attention to Norse poetry and mythology,
to the work of the minnesinger, and to
the language of Martin Luther.
First years at Weimar
Thanks to Goethe’s influence, Herder was
appointed general superintendent and
consistory councillor at Weimar in 1776.
There, anticipating Goethe, he developed
the foundations of a general morphology,
which enabled him to understand how a
Shakespearean play, for instance, or the
Gospel According to John, in the
historical context of each, was bound to
assume the individual form that it did
instead of another. Herder’s method
achieves its results by recognizing
contradictions and by resorting to a
higher unity—a method by which Herder
earns a place in the history of
dialectical logic.
It was at this time also that Herder
completed his transition to Classicism.
Among the works of this period are Vom
Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen
Seele (1778; “Of the Knowing and Sensing
of the Human Soul”), Briefe, das Studium
der Theologie betreffend (1780–81;
“Letters Concerning the Study of
Theology”), Vom Geist der ebräischen
Poesie (1782–83; The Spirit of Hebrew
Poetry), and his collection of
Volkslieder (1778–79; “Folk songs”).
Herder regarded poetry as a mode of
coming to terms with reality. Whereas
most of his contemporaries saw it either
as a product of learning or as a means
of amusement, he considered poetry to
spring from the natural and historical
environment experienced by feeling,
rather as an involuntary reaction to the
stimulus of events than as a deliberate
act. Such feeling is the organ of a
dynamic relationship between man and the
world, which is expressed far more
readily in the sounds, stresses, and
rhythms of speech than in an image. This
“voice of feeling” achieves the status
of art only when it is detached from the
man and from the historical environment
that created it and becomes rounded off
to constitute a world by itself.
Summit and later years of his career
Herder’s work at Weimar reached its peak
in Zerstreute Blätter (1785–97;
“Sporadic Papers”) and in the unfinished
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a
Philosophy of the History of Man). In
the latter work, the result of his
intercourse with Goethe, Herder
attempted to demonstrate that nature and
history obey a uniform system of laws.
Already in the development from earth to
mankind, a striving of forces was at
work, aiming to balance one another by
generating determinate forms or
individual existences. This same
phenomenon could be observed as a law of
“humanity” in man’s communal life, in
which contending forces are reconciled.
At any passing moment the measure is
individual, but the principle of the
development toward form is general. Too
often, however, man in his freedom works
against nature, for his sense of the
measure of things and his reason are
immature. Despite these shortcomings,
one must trust that growing insight and
goodwill will lead men to act according
to the truth that they recognize and,
through the conflict of nations, will
reach the equilibrium of a structure
embracing all mankind.
The basic premises underlying the
Ideen are resumed in the dialogues Gott:
einige Gespräche (1787; 2nd ed., Einige
Gespräche über Spinozas System, 1800;
“Several Discourses on Spinoza’s
System”), in which Herder combines the
views of the rationalists Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, Benedict de Spinoza,
and Anthony, Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of
Shaftesbury.
Financial difficulties, differences
of opinion over the French Revolution,
and, above all, his self-assertive
nature, which could not bear the
proximity of a greater man, led to an
estrangement of Herder from Goethe. On
Herder’s side this resulted in a bitter
enmity toward the whole Classical
movement in German poetry and
philosophy. His Briefe zu Beförderung
der Humanität (1793–97; “Letters for the
Advancement of Humanity”) and his
Adrastea (1801–03), containing treatises
on history, philosophy, and aesthetics,
emphasized the didactic purpose of all
poetry, thus contradicting that very
theory of the autonomy of the work of
art that he himself had helped to
establish. With the Christliche
Schriften (1794–98; “Christian
Writings”), the Metakritik zur Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (1799; “Metacritique
of the Critique of Pure Reason”), and
the Kalligone (1800), a metacritique of
Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Herder
began his attack on Kant, whose
philosophy he saw as a threat to his own
historical view of the world. In this
attack he had the support of Christoph
Martin Wieland, an influential poet and
novelist, and of Jean Paul.
Herder died in 1803. The first
collected edition of Herder’s works was
produced by his widow, 45 vol.
(1805–20). There is also a critical
edition by B. Suphan, 33 vol.
(1877–1913; reprinted 1967–68).
Hans Dietrich Irmscher
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Late
Enlightenment
(Sturm und Drang)
The Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement,
with its emphasis on feeling and individualism, has
often been described as having developed in
opposition to the Enlightenment, but it also adapts
and extends such basic ideas of early 18th-century
rationalism as natural law, constitutional
government, and the rights of the middle class,
especially those of middle-class women. The
Enlightenment as a European movement had begun in
England and Holland and spread from there to France.
When it finally arrived in Germany, English authors
became the models for German literature to follow
during the latter half of the 18th century, after
the influence of French Classicism had faded. Even a
literary forgery of poetic fragments by the
fictional Ossian exerted an immense influence,
because it corresponded to the German authors’ new
understanding of popular oral poetry and seemed to
provide a representative national poet in whom the
Volksseele of the Scottish Celts lived on unspoiled.
In lyric poetry,
the Sturm und Drang movement continued in admiration
of the standards set by
Herder in his essay on Ossian and by
Klopstock in his poetry. An influential group
of Göttingen poets named themselves the Göttinger
Hain (“Göttingen Grove”) in 1772 after a line from a
Klopstock poem stressing the authenticity of
native poetry vis-à-vis Classical Greek models, thus
demonstrating their enthusiastic allegiance to
Klopstock. The Sturm und Drang dramatists
admired Lessing and his bourgeois tragedies,
especially Emilia Galotti, with its social and
political criticism. Besides bourgeois tragedy, they
favoured historical drama, such as
Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and
dramatic satire; however, bourgeois tragedy remained
the prime vehicle of Sturm und Drang drama. In their
plays, the dramatists attacked social and political
conditions such as prostitution, sexual exploitation
of middle-class women by the nobility, private
education of the nobility by tutors, primogeniture,
and capital punishment for infanticide. Next to the
young
Goethe,
and the young
Friedrich Schiller
as a latecomer in 1781 with Die Räuber (The
Robbers), the major dramatists were Jakob Michael
Reinhold Lenz,
Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, Johann Anton
Leisewitz, Heinrich Leopold Wagner, and
Friedrich Müller. Their favourite male protagonists
are titanic, revolutionary characters with
self-destructive passions, fighting against the
evils of the world and ending in defeat. With the
dramatization of problems of primogeniture (Leisewitz,
Klinger, and
Schiller),
fratricide as a motif assumed biblical dimensions. A
favourite female stage figure is the deserted mother
who resorts to infanticide to avoid the social
stigma of illegitimate motherhood and faces capital
punishment as a result. This topic also formed the
core of
Goethe’s
Urfaust (begun in the early 1770s but not published
until 1887), the first version of his treatment of
the Faust figure.
The novelists,
introducing the autobiographical novel, continued a
search for authentic bourgeois voices that had begun
during the Enlightenment.
Goethe’s
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774, but
substantially revised in 1787; The Sorrows of Young
Werther) was an immense success, not only in Germany
but also throughout Europe. Changing the conventions
of the epistolary novel from an exchange of letters
to a passionate monologue,
Goethe
captured and addressed the malaise and Weltschmerz
(“world-weariness”) of his generation. Werther
narrates the desperate love affair of a sensitive
young poet-dilettante with a married woman; it ends
in the young man’s suicide. The novel sets the
passionate intensity of a fatally flawed artist type
against the plodding reliability of the middle class
and the callous stupidity and self-satisfaction of
the aristocracy. As passionate in rebellion as it
was futile in reform, Werther reflected its
generation’s opposition to societal convention and
at the same time their inability to effect change.
The other novels of
this period show lower-middle-class protagonists in
works such as
Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser, 4 vol.
(1785–90; Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel),
Ulrich Bräker’s Lebensgeschichte und natürliche
Ebenteuer des Armen Manns im Tockenburg (1789; “Life
Story and Natural Adventures of the Poor Man in
Tockenburg”), and Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s
Heinrich Stillings Jugend: eine wahrhafte Geschichte
(1777; “Heinrich Stilling’s Youth: A True Story”).
When
Goethe
accepted a civil service position at the court of
the duke of Saxony-Weimar in 1775, this conservative
turn by one of the leading figures of the movement
marked the end of the Sturm und Drang movement as a
period of generational protest.
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz
born Jan. 12, 1751, Sesswegen,
Livonia, Russia
found dead May 24, 1792, Moscow
Russian-born German poet and
dramatist of the Sturm und Drang (Storm
and Stress) period, who is considered an
important forerunner of 19th-century
Naturalism and of 20th-century
Expressionistic theatre.
Lenz studied theology at Königsberg
University but gave up his studies in
1771 to travel to Strasbourg as a tutor
and companion to two young barons von
Kleist. In Strasbourg he became a member
of Goethe’s circle and was strongly
influenced by the Sturm und Drang
sentiments of that group of dramatists.
Lenz made his reputation with plays from
the Strasbourg years, an eccentric
didactic comedy, Der Hofmeister oder
Vortheile der Privaterziehung (published
1774, performed 1778, Berlin; “The
Tutor, or the Advantages of Private
Education”), and his best play, Die
Soldaten (performed 1763, published
1776; “The Soldiers”). His plays have
dramatic and comic effects arising from
strong characters and the swift
juxtaposition of contrasting situations.
Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774;
“Observations on the Theatre”) contains
a translation of Shakespeare’s Love’s
Labour’s Lost and outlines Lenz’s
theories of dramaturgy, summarizing
conceptions of theatre that he shared
with other members of the Sturm und
Drang movement. These include contempt
for classical conventions, particularly
the unities of time and place, and a
search for utterly realistic depiction
of character.
Consumed by the ambition to become
Goethe’s equal, Lenz made himself
ridiculous by imitating both Goethe’s
writing style and his personal life in
Strasbourg and at court in Weimar, where
Lenz followed Goethe in 1776. His
eccentricities were thought to be
harmless and amusing until a tactless
parody angered Duke Charles Augustus,
who therefore expelled Lenz from the
court in disgrace. Lenz, showing signs
of mental illness, was eventually placed
in the care of the Lutheran pastor
Johann Friedrich Oberlin. (These weeks
in Oberlin’s household supplied the
material for Georg Büchner’s novella
Lenz [1839].) Lenz later returned to
Russia, spending the remaining years of
his life in aimless drifting and poverty
and, eventually, in insanity. He was
found dead in a street in Moscow.
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Friedrich Maximilian Klinger
born Feb. 17, 1752, Frankfurt am Main
died March 9, 1831, Dorpat, Estonia
dramatist and novelist, a
representative of the German literary
revolt against rationalism in favour of
emotionalism known as the Sturm und
Drang movement. Indeed, it took its name
from his play Der Wirrwarr, oder Sturm
und Drang (1776; “Confusion, or Storm
and Stress”).
The reckless, rebellious style of
Klinger’s early life seems the very
embodiment of Sturm und Drang in its
simpler interpretation. His numerous
plays, written at top speed and in the
fury of inspiration, are usually built
around a Promethean hero, but they lack
probability, psychological depth, and
dramatic form. Many of their scenes and
incidents are borrowed from Shakespeare.
The best of these works, Die Zwillinge
(1776; “The Twins”), like Schiller’s Die
Räuber (“The Robbers”), deals with a
favourite theme of the period, the
enmity of brothers.
After touring for a few years as
theatre poet with a troupe of actors,
Klinger in 1780 entered the Russian army
and rose eventually to the rank of
general. He married a natural daughter
of the empress Catherine, filled several
important posts, and was curator of the
University of Dorpat (1803–17). In his
later years, having outgrown the angry
resentment of his early period, he wrote
two tragedies on the Medea theme and a
cycle of nine romances that express a
Rousseauan longing for simplicity and
idyllic nature.
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Johann Anton Leisewitz
born May 9, 1752, Hannover, Hanover
[Germany]
died Sept. 10, 1806, Braunschweig,
Brunswick
German dramatist whose most important
work, Julius von Tarent (1776), was the
forerunner of Friedrich Schiller’s
famous Sturm und Drang masterpiece Die
Räuber (1781; The Robbers).
Leisewitz studied law at the
University of Göttingen from 1770 and
joined the Göttinger Hain group in 1774.
He entered the Brunswick administrative
service, in which he rose to high
position. His tragedy Julius von Tarent
shows Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
influence. The play, treating the
favourite Sturm und Drang theme of
fratricide, postulated a fundamental
conflict between the political state and
the individual heart. It exhibits
calculated restraint and finely drawn
characters. Leisewitz’s short dramatic
sketches Die Pfändung (1775; “The
Distraint”) and Der Besuch um
Mitternacht (1775; “The Midnight Visit”)
pursue the Sturm und Drang trend toward
the theme of social injustice, which he
had divorced from the tragic conflict in
Julius von Tarent.
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Karl Philipp Moritz
born Sept. 15, 1756, Hameln, Hannover
[Germany]
died June 26, 1793, Berlin, Prussia
German novelist whose most important
works are his two autobiographical
novels, Andreas Hartknopf (1786) and
Anton Reiser, 4 vol. (1785–90). The
latter is, with J.W. von Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister, the most mature
18th-century German novel of
contemporary life.
Moritz’ family was very poor, and he
was apprenticed to a hatter, but patrons
helped him to study theology. His
restless and unhappy nature led him to
abandon theology in an attempt to become
an actor. This attempt failed, however,
and, after completing his studies, he
taught in Dessau and Potsdam and finally
in a Gymnasium in Berlin, where he was
briefly editor of the Vossische Zeitung
(with which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had
been associated). In 1786 he traveled to
Italy, where he met Goethe, whom he
later advised on artistic theory. After
his return to Berlin in 1789 he became
professor of aesthetics and archaeology
at the Academy of Arts.
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Heinrich Jung-Stilling
born Sept. 12, 1740, Grund,
Westphalia [Germany]
died April 2, 1817, Karlsruhe
German writer best known for his
autobiography, Heinrich Stillings Leben,
5 vol. (1806), the first two volumes of
which give a vividly realistic picture
of village life in an 18th-century
pietistic family.
Jung-Stilling worked as a
schoolteacher at age 15 and later was an
apprentice in various trades and a
private tutor, among other occupations.
He then studied medicine at Strasbourg,
where he met J.W. von Goethe.
Jung-Stilling impressed Goethe, who
arranged the publication of the first
(and best) two volumes of Heinrich
Stillings Jugend (1777; “Heinrich
Stilling’s Youth”). This work’s piety
and simplicity was influential in the
pietistic tide opposed to the
rationalism of the Enlightenment. In
1772 Jung-Stilling settled as a
physician at Elberfeld and made a name
for himself with his successful
operations for cataract. In 1778 he
became a lecturer in economics and other
related subjects at the Kameralschule in
Kaiserslautern and then in 1787 at
Marburg. In 1803 he received a pension
from the prince-elector of Baden. In
addition to his autobiography and
economic textbooks, he wrote
mystical-pietistic works and novels, the
best known of which is the allegorical
novel Das Heimweh (1794–97;
“Homesickness”).
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Weimar
Classicism:
Goethe and
Schiller
Monument to the poets Goethe and Schiller at Weimar,
Germany
It took
Goethe
more than 10 years to adapt himself to life at the
court. After a two-year sojourn in Italy from 1786
to 1788, he published his first Neoclassical work,
the drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (1779–87; Iphigenie
in Tauris), which reflects his reading of the great
Greek dramas, specifically of Euripides’ Iphigeneia
en Taurois.
Goethe’s
Iphigenie, in blank verse, marks the beginning of
Weimar Classicism, with its projection of
objectivity of form and a new ethical message of
Humanität in opposition to barbarism. (Weimar
Classicism owes its name to
Goethe’s
and
Schiller’s
residence at Weimar.) Iphigenie rescues her brother
Orestes from the death to which he is condemned by
the harsh customs of the island of Tauris, where she
lives in exile. She softens the harshness of the
“barbarian” king Thoas, calling forth his
forgiveness by throwing herself and her brother
completely at his mercy and facing death rather than
lie to save her family. He is so moved by her
honesty and trustfulness, by what Goethe would call
some years later her “pure humanity” (reine
Menschlichkeit), that he releases her and her Greek
countrymen to return home. Iphigenie’s “humanity”
not only conquers barbaric customs; it also lifts
the curse that pursues her entire family, the
descendants of Tantalus—the same curse that had
driven her brother Orestes to kill his own mother,
Clytemnestra.
Goethe
completed his Renaissance drama Torquato Tasso
(1790) on the eve of the French Revolution. It deals
with the fate of the bourgeois poet in courtly
society and arises from
Goethe’s
own dilemma at the court of Weimar.
The poet
Tasso
finds himself isolated and misunderstood by the
court. He feels that he can no longer glorify his
noble patron and the aristocratic society that
nurtures and protects him but must respond to a
higher calling that commands him to express his
individual suffering. In the final scene,
Tasso, exiled
in favour of the courtier and diplomat
Antonio, embraces his rival, who saves him from
self-destruction and helps him to accept his new
identity as a bourgeois poet.
The meeting of
Goethe and
Schiller
in Weimar and Jena in 1794 began not only a
friendship but also a dialogue that proved mutually
productive and creative. It was at
Schiller’s
insistence that Goethe resumed his major work,
Faust, Part I, which he completed three years after
Schiller’s
death in 1808. Weimar Classicism was the “shared
achievement” (as T.J. Reed puts it in his 1984
biography Goethe) of Goethe and Schiller and is
considered the culmination of German literature.
Goethe’s
and
Schiller’s
move toward Greek Classicism at the end of the 18th
century was motivated by the search for aesthetic
standards in contemporary literature. Both were
aware that they could not repeat the achievements of
Greek Classicism but that an infusion of Classical
Greek aesthetics would contribute to new forms for
their culture and literature, forms suited to the
character of their time. Their Classicism was to be
an integration of individualism into a higher form
and a reformulation of Herder’s concept of
Humanität. For this purpose
Goethe
employed Classical metres and genres such as the
epigram, the elegy, and even the epic, as in his
idyll Hermann und Dorothea (1797), for example,
which portrays in Greek hexameters the fate of
German refugees from the French Revolution. But
Goethe and
Schiller
did not shun modern genres, such as the ballad or,
in
Goethe’s
case, the novel. With his Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), Goethe
provided the “founding text” of the German
bildungsroman. The concept of Bildung (“formation”),
linked to Humanität as harmonious development of
individuality, was central to
Goethe’s
work. His protagonist, Wilhelm Meister, progresses
through a series of metamorphoses of role and
character, eventually abandoning ill-conceived plans
for a career in the theatre. Gradually in the course
of the novel and its much later continuation,
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821–29; Wilhelm
Meister’s Years of Travel), the notion of a
significant destiny toward which the hero
develops—inward compulsion finding direction through
experience, the ego-driven goal of formation of the
inner kernel of selfhood—gives way to a more modest
ideal of restraint and self-control achieved through
adapting to wise and authoritative models outside
the self. Wilhelm ends his development modestly by
becoming an ordinary medic. In spite of the hero’s
incomplete and modest Bildung, Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre became a model for the German novel of
education until the 20th century.
Like
Goethe,
Schiller
was a many-sided talent. Alongside his lyric and
historical works (a history of the Thirty Years’ War
among them), he had established a reputation with
his powerful dramas of the Sturm und Drang period,
but his Classical period produced his major dramas,
the Wallenstein trilogy (1800–01, drawing on his
historian’s knowledge of the Thirty Years’ War) and
Maria Stuart (1800), probably his most successful
play. The figure of the condemned rival of Queen
Elizabeth for the throne of England is the dramatic
realization of
Schiller’s
idea of erhabene Seele (“sublimity of soul”).
Schiller’s
Mary Stuart attains sublimity by facing her death
with a noble dignity that overcomes all desire and
worldly ambition and makes her in death superior to
her successful rival, Elizabeth.
In Die Jungfrau von
Orleans (1801; The Maid of Orleans),
Schiller’s Joan of Arc dies a sublime death
on the battlefield, instead of perishing at the
stake as the historical Joan did. His last drama,
Demetrius (1805)—on the deluded pretender to the
Russian throne at the end of the 16th
century—remains a fragment.
Schiller
had found the philosophical essay useful in his
early days, but the form came to fruition in his
Classical period. His most influential philosophical
works were Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des
Menschen (1795; Letters upon the Aesthetic Education
of Man), Über Anmut und Würde (1793; “On Grace and
Dignity”), and Über naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung (1795–96; Naive and Sentimental Poetry).
Schiller
developed his ideas of Anmut (“grace”) and Würde
(“dignity”) under the influence of Immanuel Kant.
The Kantian notion of the sublime allowed
Schiller to
articulate an ideal of the subjection of Neigung
(“impulse”) to Pflicht (“duty”), which results in an
inner composition and control expressed outwardly in
grace and composure. The dramatic protagonists of
his Classical dramas (particularly Mary Stuart and
Joan of Arc) embody the ethical message essential to
grace and dignity by maintaining Humanität in the
face of adversity. The essay Naive and Sentimental
Poetry presents itself as a reflection on two types
of poetry—one spontaneous and natural (naiv), the
other forced and calculated, a product of will and
laborious poetic engineering (sentimentalisch). In
it
Schiller
also reflects on the difference between himself, the
“sentimental” writer, and his envied friend Goethe,
the “naive” poet. According to
Schiller,
all truly modern literature is “sentimental”;
“naive” poetry is a lost mode from a
no-longer-attainable phase of creativity, one that
is only recoverable in individual geniuses like
Goethe, not in the spirit of the contemporary world.
An important
accomplishment of their friendship was the
completion of
Goethe’s
Faust, Part I (1808). The play’s core was the
infanticide tragedy Urfaust (from the 1770s), in
which a village girl, Margarete, is destroyed along
with her whole family by her love affair with Faust.
The latter, a scholar and professor glutted with dry
book learning and hungry for experience, resorts to
magic, arranges a pact with the Devil, and embarks
on a journey with his new companion, Mephistopheles,
that leads him straight to Margarete and their fatal
love affair. The greater drama of 1808 fits this
tragic love story into the cosmic frame of a wager
between God and Mephisto, modeled on the wager of
God with Satan in the biblical book of Job. The
wager is not that Faust will shun evil but that his
association with the Devil will not deter him from
ultimately striving for God as the central monad
(see above for a discussion of Leibnitz’s
Monadology). The bet is ultimately resolved in
Faust, Part II (1832), in favour of God—contrary to
the Renaissance tradition in which Faust forfeits
his soul. Faust can be redeemed because of his
striving for God and the supernal love that comes to
his aid. The cosmic drama of the play’s final scenes
is an apocalyptic allegory reminiscent of
Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
Faust’s soul is wrested from the Devil partly by the
intercession of his former beloved, Margarete, who
comes to earth from heaven, in a chorus including
other redeemed women as well as the Mater
Gloriosa (“Glorious Mother,” an epithet for the
Virgin Mary present in Catholic litany), to receive
Faust’s earthly remains and to inspire the closing
lines of the drama:
Alles
Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichniss;
Das Unzulängliche
Hier wird’s Ereigniss;
Das Unbeschreibliche
Hier ist’s getan
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
All that is
transitory
Is but a parable;
The unattainable
Here it is done;
The ineffable
Here becomes fact:
The Eternal Feminine
Shows us the way to transcend.
A chorus of angels
sings that his redemption is realized through his
“constant striving”: “Wer immer strebend sich
bemüht,/ Den können wir erlösen” (“We can give
redemption to him who struggles in constant
questing”). But human striving would be in vain if
it were not for the “Liebe von oben” (“supernal
love”), the divine love embodied in Margarete.
Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
"Faust"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART III
Illustrations by Eugene Delacroix and
Harry Clarke
Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1786) by
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
born Aug. 28, 1749, Frankfurt am Main
[Germany]
died March 22, 1832, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar
German poet, novelist, playwright,
andnatural philospoher, the greatest
figure of the German Romantic period and
of German literature as a whole.
One of the giants of world literature,
Goethe was perhaps the last European to
attempt the mastery and many-sidedness
of the great Renaissance personalities:
critic, journalist, painter, theatre
manager, statesman, educationalist,
natural philosopher. The bulk and
diversity of his output is in itself
phenomenal: his writings on science
alone fill about 14 volumes. In the
lyric vein he displayeda command of a
unique variety of theme and style; in
fiction he ranged from fairy tales,
which have proved a quarry for
psychoanalysts, through the poetic
concentration of his shorter novels and
Novellen (novellas) to the “open,”
symbolic form of Wilhelm Meister; in the
theatre, from historical, political, or
psychological plays in prose through
blank-verse drama to his Faust , one of
the masterpieces of modern literature.
He achieved in his 82 years a wisdom
often termed Olympian, even inhuman; yet
almost to the end he retained a
willingness to let himself be shaken to
his foundations by love or sorrow. He
disciplined himself to a routine that
might armour him against chaos; yet he
never lost the power of producing
magical short lyrics in which the
mystery of living,loving, and thinking
was distilled into sheer transparency.
And at the last there was granted him a
gift, uncanny even to himself, of
tapping at will the springs of
creativity in order to complete the work
he had carried with him for 60 years.
When, a few months before his death, he
sealed his Faust, he bequeathed it with
ironic resignation to the critics of
posterity to discover its imperfections.
Its final couplet, “Das
Ewig-Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan”
(“Eternal Womanhead/Leads us on high”),
epitomizes his own feeling about the
central polarity of human existence:
woman was to him at once man's energizer
and his civilizer, source of creative
life and focus of the highest endeavours
of both mind and spirit.
There was in Goethe a natural, if not
always painless, swing between poles of
existence often thought to be mutually
exclusive and an innate commitment to
change and process.And, in the last
letter he was to write, he rounded off
what has sometimes been called his
greatest work, his life, by setting the
seal of his approval on a mode of growth
that sees the art of living as the
intensification of inborn talents
through a judicious surrender to the
natural rhythm of opposing tendencies.
Early life and influences
Goethe came of middle-class stock, the
Bürgertum that he never ceased to praise
as a breeding ground of the finest
culture. His father, Johann Kaspar
Goethe, was of north German extraction.
A retired lawyer, he was able to lead a
life of cultured leisure, travelling in
Italy and amassing a well-stocked
library and picture gallery in his
handsomely furnished house. Goethe's
mother, Katharine Elisabeth Textor, was
the daughter of a Bürgermeister (mayor)
of Frankfurt; she opened up to her son
valued connections with the patriciate
of the free city. Thus even in his
heredity Goethe unites those opposing
tendencies that have always prevailed in
German lands: the intellectual and moral
rigour of the north and the easygoing
artistic sensuousness of the south. Of
eight children, only Wolfgang, the
firstborn, and his sister, Cornelia,
survived.
In his autobiography, Dichtung und
Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth”), Goethe
left an unforgettable picture of a happy
childhood. Here are set out with acute
psychological insight the emotional
complexities of his bond with Cornelia,
which found expression in numerous
portrayals of the brother–sister
relationship in his works; his
passionate attachment to a barmaid,
Gretchen, which foreshadowed the
rejection pattern of many of his loves;
the broadening of outlook that came with
French occupation during the Seven
Years' War; the coronation of Joseph II
in the Frankfurt Römer, with its
indelible impressions of medieval
pageantry;and the fervent religiosity of
Pietistic circles, which led him to
declaim F.G. Klopstock's Messias
(“Messiah”) as a kind of Lenten
exercise, to write a prose epic on
Joseph and a poem on Christ's descent
into hell. The French army had brought
itsown troupe of actors, and their
performances intensified a passion for
the stage, first kindled in him by his
grandmother's gift of a puppet theatre,
and inspired a lifelong devotion to
Racine. A love of things English was
fostered by friendship with a young
clothier from Leeds (Goethe's paternal
grandfather was a fashionable tailor)
with whom Cornelia, seeing herself as
the heroine of a Richardsonian novel,
fell hopelessly in love. Wolfgang's
reaction was the inception of a novel in
letters, a kind of linguistic exercise
in which four brothers correspond in
different languages.
In October 1765 Goethe was sent to study
law at his father'sold University of
Leipzig, though he himself would have
preferred to read classics in the newly
founded university at Göttingen, where
English influence prevailed. In Leipzig,
or “little Paris” as he calls it in
Faust, by contrast, a world of elegance
and fashion made the young provincial
feel like a fish out of water. The
Frenchifying influence of the critic
J.C. Gottsched still dominated the
theatre and provided a repertory of the
best plays of contemporary Europe. But
C.F. Gellert, poet and author of fables
and hymns, now in the heyday of his
fame, presented the new sensibility of
Edward Young, Laurence Sterne, and
Samuel Richardson. Goethe praised
Gellert's lectures as “the foundation of
German moral culture” and learned from
them invaluable lessons in epistolary
style and in social conduct. Gellert's
literary influence was reinforced by the
robust elegance and ironic sagacity of
the novels, tales, and epics of C.M.
Wieland. Wieland's work was brought to
Goethe's notice by A.F. Oeser, a friend
and teacher of the archaeologist and art
historian J.J. Winckelmann, who
profoundly influenced European fashions
in art. From Oeser, Goethe learned a
loveof Greek art and two things that
stood him in good stead all his life: to
use his eyes and to master the craft of
whatever he undertook. A visit to
Dresden, “the Florence of the north,” as
the poet and critic J.G. Herder called
it, opened his eyes to the splendours of
Rococo architecture as well as classical
statuary. Nor was music neglected in his
education; a new 18th-century concert
society, under the direction of the
musician and composer J.A. Hiller,
provided splendid performances, which
became world famous as the Gewandhaus
concerts.
The literary harvest of Goethe's Leipzig
period manifested itself in a songbook
written in the prevailing Rococo
mode—songs praising love and wine in the
manner of the Greek poet Anacreon.
Appropriately titled Das Leipziger
Liederbuch (The Leipzig Song Book), it
was ostensibly inspired by the daughter
of the wine merchant at whose tavern he
took his midday meal. But neither his
1766–67 poems Das Buch Annette (“The
Book Annette”; as he called her in
Rococo fashion) nor the Neue Lieder
(“New Songs”) of 1769 made any pretense
of real passion. Yet it was in
connection with these literary trifles
that he subsequently made the famous and
much abused statement that all his works
were “fragments of a great confession.”
The same note is struck in two plays
written in alexandrine verse (a
12-syllable iambic line borrowed from
the French), Die Launedes Verliebten
(“The Mood of the Beloved”) and a more
sombre farce, Die Mitschuldigen (“The
Accomplices”), which foreshadows the
psychological preoccupations of later
works. From then on, Rococo was one
element in Goethe's repertoire, to be
drawn on as occasion demanded. It was to
reappear in the setting of Torquato
Tasso and Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elected Affinities); he was to pay
tribute to its charm in Anakreons Grab
(“Anacreon's Grave”; 1806) and
amalgamate it with Eastern influence in
enchanting poems of the West-östlicher
Divan (“Divan of East and West”).
Works of the storm and stress period
Goethe's stay in Leipzig was cut short
by severe illness, andby the autumn of
1768 he was back home. A long
convalescence fostered introspection and
religious mysticism. He played with
alchemy, astrology, and occult
philosophy, all of which left their mark
on Faust. On his recovery it was decided
that he should pursue legal studies in
Strassburg as a first stage on the way
to Paris and the Grand Tour (never
actually completed). His stay there
proved a turning point for his whole
life and work. In this German capital of
a French province, he experienced a
reaction against the cosmopolitan
atmosphere of Leipzig and under the
impact of the great cathedral proclaimed
his conversion to the Gothic German
ideal. More decisive still was the
influence of J.G. Herder, who spent the
winter of 1770–71 there undergoing
treatment for his eyes. From him Goethe
learned the role played by touch, the
haptic sense, in the growth of the mind;
a new view of the artist as a creator
fashioning forms expressive of feeling;
a new theoryof poetry as the original
and most vital language of man; the
virtues of a new style, that of the
Volkslied (folk song) and the poetry of
“primitive” peoples as enshrined in the
Bible, the epics of Homer, and the poems
attributed (falsely) to Ossian, a
3rd-century Celtic poet. It is this new
sense of felt immediacy, and of the
plasticity of his linguistic medium,
that informs the lyrics Goethe wrote to
one of his early loves, Friederike
Brion, the pastor's daughter of
Sesenheim. They mark the beginning of a
new epoch in the German lyric. Such
poems as “Mailied” (“May Song”) and
“Willkommen und Abschied” (“Welcome and
Farewell”) are still the most popular,
though not the greatest, of his Lieder.
The latter, especially in its revised
form of 1790, touchingly expresses the
guilt he felt that this time he himself
had the role of deserter and rejecter,
and the whole idyll as recounted in
Dichtung und Wahrheit reveals that
cross-fertilization of life and
literature that he increasingly saw as a
potent factor in human development.
If, as Herder maintained, energy was one
of the marks of poetry, it was clearly
in the passions acted out on the stage
that it could find its most vital
expression. And where more vital than in
the colossal figures of the “Gothic
Shakespeare”? In writing the Geschichte
Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der
eisernen Hand dramatisiert (1771;
“TheDramatized History of Gottfried von
Berlichingen of the Iron Hand”), Goethe
was deliberately vying with Shakespeare.
For the real Götz, who died two years
before Shakespeare was born, was near
enough in time to represent that
bustling spacious 16th century, the
animal vitality of which contrasted so
forcibly with the straitlaced
affectations of Goethe's own day. With
the publication in 1773 of Götz von
Berlichingen , a radically tautened
version of that “History,” the
Shakespeare cult was launched, and the
Sturm und Drang(storm and stress)
movement was provided with its first
major work of genius. The manifesto of
the movement, heralded by Goethe's
enthusiastic Rede zum Schakespears Tag
(“Conversation from Shakespeare's Day”),
had appeared after Goethe's return to
Frankfurt in August 1771. “Von deutscher
Art und Kunst” (“Concerning German
Natureand Art”), as it was called,
contained a defense of German
nationality by the historian J.M. Möser,
two essays by Herder championing Ossian
and Shakespeare, and a rhapsody on
Gothic architecture by Goethe.
Though ostensibly in practice as a
lawyer, the young poet now found himself
caught up in a whirl of literary and
social duties—helping to edit the
Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen
(“Frankfurt Scholarly Reviews”), for
instance—and it was to break loose from
this that he left for Wetzlar, seat of
the supreme court of the Empire. But
again literature won the day over law,
and an impassioned yet self-ironic ode
in free verse, “Wandrers Sturmlied”
(“Wanderer's Storm Song”), is testimony
both to a recently inspired admiration
for Pindar, the greatest lyric poet of
ancient Greece, and to a hesitant
certainty that he himself might be
destined for greatness. And in Wetzlar
he experienced a new passion, this time
for a girl safely out of reach from the
start, Charlotte Buff. Her betrothed,
Johann Christian Kestner, showed great
understanding until, as it seemed to
him, he found the affair exposed to
public gaze in Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther;
1774).
But much besides the Wetzlar experience
had gone into the making of this novel:
Herder's scathing comments on his young
pupil's lack of formal- and
self-mastery; the recent indictment by
G.E. Lessing of the Neoplatonic doctrine
of artistic creation in Emilia Galotti;
a passing attraction to Maximiliane, the
daughter of the German novelist Sophie
von La Roche, who probably endowed his
heroine with her black eyes. And it was
only when Kestner reported the suicide
of a Wetzlar acquaintance who had killed
himself out of hopeless love that all
this was precipitated into a plot. If
Werther took the world by storm it was
because, in Thomas Carlyle's words, it
gave expression to “the nameless unrest
and longing discontent which was then
agitating every bosom.” But this first
novel is no sentimental tearjerker. Nor
is disappointed love its real theme. It
is rather what the 18th century called
Enthusiasm: the fatal effects of a
predilectionfor absolutes, whether in
love, art, society, or the realm of
thought. The mind that conceived its
symmetry, wove its intricate linguistic
patterns, and handled the subtle
differentiation of hero and narrator was
moved by a formal as well as a personal
passion. Even the title has been
trivialized in translation: Sorrows
(instead of “Sufferings”) obscures the
allusion to the Passion of Christ and
individualizes what Goethe himself
thought of as a “general confession,” in
a tradition going back to St. Augustine.
Besides Werther and Götz, the period
1771–75 saw the appearance of a number
of magnificent hymns—lyrical or
dramatic, according to whether the
influence of Pindar or Shakespeare
prevailed—“Cäsar,” “Mahomets Gesang”
(“Mahomet's Singing”), “Der Ewige Jude”
(“The Eternal Jew”), “Prometheus,”
“Sokrates,” “Satyros,” “Der Wandrer”
(“The Wanderer”); the inception of
Egmont and Faust (this so-called
Urfaust, or “original” version of Faust,
was discovered by a lucky chance in
1887); the completion of Clavigo , a
play of more “regular” form on a theme
of the French playwright Beaumarchais,
and of Stella (1775), with its
conciliatory ending of a mariage à
trois, subsequently conventionalized
into tragedy. Two operettas, Erwin und
Elmire and Claudine von Villa Bella,
reflect a return to the elegance of
Rococo inspired by Goethe's betrothal to
Lili Schönemann, daughter of a rich
banker, who moved in fashionable circles
that were soon to prove unbearably
restrictive to the young Stürmer und
Dränger. From the conflicts of this love
he took refuge, as so often, in nature;
and in a poem written on the lake of
Zürich, “Auf dem See” (“On the Lake”),
created the first of those many short
lyrics in which language of radiant
simplicity is made the vehicle of
inexhaustible significance. With his
departure for Weimar in November 1775,
the engagement was allowed to lapse.
The mature years at Weimar
Going to Weimar was the major turning
point of Goethe's life. He went on a
visit to the reigning duke, Charles
Augustus. It remained his home—despite
Napoleon's invitation to Paris—until his
death there on March 22, 1832. From now
on, mastery of life became his chief
concern; and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship ;
1824), the title he eventually gave his
next novel (1795–96), suggests the long
apprenticeship such mastery involves. He
served his own in the innumerable and
ever increasing official duties the
young duke heaped on his willing
shoulders until, as indispensable
minister of the little state, he was
inspecting mines, superintending
irrigation schemes, and even organizing
the issue of uniforms to its tiny army.
He served his apprenticeship, too, in
his passionate devotionto the wife of a
court official, Charlotte von Stein. For
the first time he found himself in love
with a woman who could also meet him on
the intellectual plane. From the 1,500
or so letters he wrote her we can see
her become the guiding principle of his
life, teaching him the graces of
society, dominating the details of his
daily existence, engaging his
imagination and desire, yet insisting on
a relation governed by decorum and
conventional virtue. She would be his
sister and nothing more, and the
sublimation she increasingly enforced on
him, though irksome, could inspire the
almost psychoanalytical probings of
“Warum gabst du uns die tiefen Blicke?”
(“Why did you give us the deep
glances?”), the tortures of Orestes and
their assuagement by Iphigenie, the
delicate one-act play, Die Geschwister
(“Brother and Sister”; 1776), and such
well-loved lyrics as “An den Mond” (“To
the Moon”), “Der Becher” (“The Cup”),
“Jägers Abendlied” (“Hunter's Evening
Song”), “Seefahrt” (“Sea Journey”), and
the two exquisite “Wandrers Nachtlieder”
(“Wanderer's Night Songs”).
In these and other poems of this
period—“Grenzen der Menschheit” (“Limits
of Mankind”), “Gesang der Geister über
den Wassern” (“Singing of the Spirits
over the Water”), “Das Göttliche” (“The
Divine”), “Harzreise im Winter”
(“Journey in the Harz Mountains in
Winter”), “Ilmenau”—nature has ceased to
be a mere reflection of man's moods and
has become something existing in its own
right, a setting for an idea or a force
indifferent, even hostile to him. This
new “objectivity” is in tune with
Goethe's growing scientific
preoccupations. Yet such is his
versatility that he could, when he
chose, revert to the temper of “Der
König in Thule” (“The King in Thule”;
written in 1774) and compose ballads
such as “Erlkönig” (“King of the Elves”)
or “Der Fischer” (“The Fisherman”), in
which nature bears the projection of
unconscious forces; while a number of
Singspiele, or musical plays, betoken
his readiness and ability to provide
light entertainment for the court. Der
Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (“The Triumph
of Sensibility”) even satirizes the
sensibility his own Werther had helped
to foster.
But neither the cares of state nor those
of a frustrating love affair were
conducive to the peace and leisure
required to complete works of such
magnitude as Egmont, Faust, Tasso, and
Iphigenie (a prose version of this last
was sufficiently advanced to be put on
before the court in 1779 with Goethe
himself in the role of Orestes). And in
September 1786, in dramatic secrecy and
with the haste of one pursued, he set
out on his long-postponed Italian
journey. This flight was at once a death
and a rebirth. And it was in these terms
that he wrote of it in his letters. He
sought the renewal of himself, both as
man and artist, and so deliberately cut
himself off from his emotional,
literary, and cultural past, scorning
the “Gothic follies” he had once
acclaimed, rejecting Juliet's tomb in
Verona in favour of the Greek steles in
the museum, finding delight in
Palladio's churches rather than in San
Marco or the doge's palace, devoting
barely three hours to Florence, and
ignoring completely the medieval glories
of Assisi for the sake of its temple of
Minerva, feverishly bent on arriving in
Rome, “capital of the ancient world,”
but seeing even that as a prelude to
Magna Graecia, to the temples of
Paestum, and the revelation of classical
grandeurin Sicily, “key to the whole,” a
prelude to the world of Homer, which he
recaptured in a glorious dramatic
fragment, Nausikaa (1787). And just as
he sought and found the Urmensch, or
archetypal man, in the forms of Greek
antiquity, so in these landscapes there
came to his mind the extension of this
idea to plants as well. In his literary
work these pursuits led to the creation
of beings who are individual
manifestations but of a clearly
discernible type; tothemes that are
universal and timeless but treated in a
highly differentiated way; to the
measured cadences of verse that are yet
vibrant with personal passion.
This new conception of form is apparent
in the revision of the four plays he had
taken with him to Italy. Faust, Ein
Fragment (“Faust, a Fragment”),
published in 1790, is quite clearly, by
its excisions as well as its additions,
a step in the direction of the
stupendous cultural symbol the play
would eventually become rather than any
attempt to weld into dramatic unity the
sharply individualized episodes of the
original version, the Urfaust. Egmont,
though not actually cast into verse, is
raised to the level of poetic drama not
by virtue of its frequent iambic rhythms
but by a thickening of the verbal
texture, so that when music finally
takes over it seems the inevitable
culmination of a gradual convergence and
sudden contraction of themes rather than
the “salto mortale (i.e., somersault)
into the world of opera” Schiller was to
dub it. By such means, the personal and
the political aspects of the problem
become completely interfused—Egmont and
his beloved Klärchen, the most lovable
characters Goethe ever created, are
embodiments of an inner freedom that is
a heightened form of the easygoing
independence of the Netherlands
people—and what had started as a
dramatic portrayal of a daemonic
individual is transformed into a tragedy
of the very idea of freedom, of its fate
in a world ruled not just by calculation
or intrigue but by unpredictable
conjunctures of persons and events.
In Torquato Tasso such linguistic
density is carried to lengths possible
only in verse. Goethe spoke of having
expended a positively “unlawful care” on
it. But this is not inappropriate to a
play about a poet, an artist whose
mediumis the ordinary vehicle of
communication between men. The tragic
conflict here arises from
misunderstandings about the various
modes of language, and the temperamental
clashes are presented as concomitants of
this rather than as the prime focus of
interest (though there is enough
psychology to justify the description by
the French writer Mme de Staël of Goethe
as “le Racine de l'Allemagne”). The
slightness of the outward action in
Torquato Tasso has been much criticized,
but it can be justified in a study of
the “poetical character” per se—a
creature for whom “any little vexation
grows in five minutes into a theme for
Sophocles.” By placing him in a society
that, far from being indifferent or
hostile, cherishes him and values his
work, Goethe has thrown into sharpest
relief the incurable “discrepancy”
between poet and world, and this rift is
not healed by Tasso'sdiscovery that even
the extremes of anguish can be
transmuted into imperishable verse.
But it was perhaps Iphigenie auf Tauris
(1787) that benefitted most from his
encounter with classical antiquity. And
yet Schiller was right in calling it
“astonishingly modern and un-Greek.”
Like Tasso, it too treats of the
problems of communication: of the
unforeseeable power of words once they
are released into the world; of the
double face of language, which conceals
as much as it reveals; of truth, whose
opposite is not just an outright lie but
the withholding of self. But it treats,
too, of man's power to free himself from
his myths by recognizing them as
projections of his own unconscious, of
his power to break the chain of events
that seems to determine his present
(symbolized in the monotonously regular
crime sequence of the race of Tantalus)
by a reorientation of outlook. The
conciliatory ending, which Euripides
contrived by the sudden appearanceof the
goddess Athena, here comes with the
apparent suddenness of new insight: the
words of the oracle are susceptible to a
different interpretation. In its
synthesis of Greek and Christian values,
its elevation of the physical to the
spiritual through the identification of
Iphigenie with the divine sister, Diana,
this play represents the highest
achievement of 18th-century humanism.
The chief lyrical product of the Italian
journey was the Römische Elegien (“Roman
Elegies”; written 1788–89). In their
plastic beauty and unabashed sensuality,
their blending of erotic tenderness with
an enhanced sense of our cultural
heritage, these pagan, highly civilized
poems are unique in any modern language.
Had they been written in themetre of
Byron's Don Juan, Goethe acknowledged,
they might easily have been offensive;
but the classical distichs (couplets)
lend them that veil of aesthetic
distance that reveals even as it
shrouds. The true begetter of these
elegies was not some passing Roman amour
but Christiane Vulpius, daughter of a
humble official, whom Goethe had taken
into heart and home soon after his
return from Italy in April 1788.
Christiane bore him several children;
but it was not until 1806, when life and
property were threatened by the French
invasion, that the nonconformist
eventually conformed and in grateful
recognition of its indissoluble bonds
regularized their union in the eyes of
society.
His first Italian journey finally
brought home to Goethe that,for all his
interest and talent, he was not destined
to be a painter. Despite diligent
practice with his artist friends in
Rome, he was never able to master this
medium to the point at which it became
expressive of his deepest feeling, and
with rare exceptions his numerous
drawings have no more than the charm of
a sensitive amateur. But his abiding
preoccupation with the visual arts left
an indelible mark on his literary as
well as his scientific work and gave
added precision to his many critical and
aesthetic essays. And it was on this
first visit to Italy, too, that he
finally reached the decision that he
must shed his administrative duties and
devote himself henceforth to his true
vocation of literature and science.
A return visit to Italy in 1790 brought
nothing but disappointment, and a
restlessness aggravated by the
revolutionary events in the outer world.
The Epigramme. Venedig 1790. (“Venetian
Epigrams of 1790”) reflect something of
this discontent. In 1792 Goethe
accompanied his duke on the disastrous
campaign into France, was present at the
battle of Valmy, and wrote up his
experiences in two still very readable
war books, Campagne in Frankreich 1792
and Belagerung von Mainz (“Siege of
Mainz”). His liberal-conservative
attitudes found expression in Reineke
Fuchs (“Reynard the Fox”), a recasting
of the Low German satire, the
Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten
(“Conversations of German Emigrants”),
and three plays. Der Gross-Cophta, Die
Aufgeregten (“The Agitated”), and Der
Bürgergeneral (“The Citizen General”),
which, though artistically unsuccessful,
are of interest in being among the few
examples of political literature
produced by German poets. But it was
only as the French Revolution receded
that he was able to transmute its
overwhelming actuality into timeless
poetry. It still forms the background of
his Homeric treatment of the refugee
problem, Hermann und Dorothea (1797). It
fills the whole canvas of Die Natürliche
Tochter (“The Natural Daughter”; 1804).
Planned as a trilogy but never
completed, this was Goethe's final
reckoning with the greatest event of his
time. Beneath the coolness of its
formalperfection there stirs a profound
concern with revolutionary phenomena,
with the role of death and destruction
in the perpetuation of social and
cultural, no less than of natural, forms
of life.
Schiller and the classical ideal
The human and spiritual isolation in
which Goethe found himself on his return
from Italy was unexpectedly relieved by
the development of a friendship with
Schiller. His acceptance of a formal
invitation to contribute to a new
journal, Die Horen (1795–97; “The
Horae”), called forth Schiller's
now-famous letter of August 23, 1794, in
which, with marvelous insight, he summed
up Goethe's whole existence. Here, it
seemed to him, was the very embodiment
of the naive poet—but consciously naive,
moving from feeling to reflection and
then transforming reflection back into
feeling, concepts of the mind back into
percepts of the senses. It was this
conscious assent to a mode of thinking
different from Schiller's own more
abstractive reflection thatmade possible
their immensely fruitful partnership,
and the four volumes of their daily
correspondence offer not only an
invaluable commentary on the ideals and
achievements of the greatest period of
German literature but astonishing
insight into the processes of artistic
creation. Some of the works Goethe
produced during the next few years are
embodiments of their classical ideal.
Hermann und Dorothea, one of the best
loved, is his attempt to “produce a
Greece from within.” In it he claimed to
have “separated the purely human from
the dross.” The characters are
types—except forthe hero and heroine,
they have no proper names, and even
theirs are symbolic—and like those of
the Odyssey they vindicate peace and
home and the domestic virtues. Yet, as
always in Goethe's works, these are
shown as never secure for long, as
constantly in need of being fostered by
man's efforts to be human and humane. In
the Helena act of Faust, Part II, in
which the meeting and mating of Faust
and Helen ofTroy marks the synthesis of
paganism and Christianity, of Greece and
Germany, he captured the Greek spirit so
successfully that competent critics hold
that if translated into Attic Greek it
might well pass for a lost fragment of
the Athenian stage.
A never completed epic, Achilleis, is
his last attempt to “be a Greek after
his own fashion.” Other works of this
period are in tune with Schiller's
growing conviction that the only future
for literature in a world that
increasingly clamoured for the
naturalistic and the tendentious lay in
a hermetic closing of the poetic world
by a frank introduction of symbolic
devices. Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische
Sendung (“Wilhelm Meister'sTheatrical
Mission”; a manuscript of this version
turned up in1910) is now widened to a
vocation for life, a theme dear to the
heart of Schiller, who had himself just
completed a treatise Über die
ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in
einer Reihe von Briefen (1795; “On the
Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series
of Letters”) and wholly in tune with
their joint conviction that art, though
not the handmaid of either truth or
morality, has nevertheless its own
peculiar part to play in making better
men and better citizens. Fictional
realism is now blended with abstraction;
characterization, however
psychologically acute, subordinated to
an overall poetic significance; and the
presence in a novel of contemporary
society of such mysteriously compelling
figures as the Harper and Mignon seems
to justify Goethe's claim that his novel
is “thoroughly symbolic.”
It was Schiller, too, who turned his
thoughts to the continuation of Faust
and discerned the difficulties involved
in reconciling this “barbarous
composition” with their classical ideal,
in blending the evident seriousness of
its “idea” with that element of “play”
that was the prerequisite of the art of
the future. By his insistence on such
problems, he inspired the fictional
framework of Faust's “Prelude on the
Stage” no less than the philosophical
framework of the “Prologue in Heaven.”
If, in spite of such indications, the
world insisted on reading Faust, Part I
(1808) as a love story, which stamped
its author as a Romantic, it was because
at this stage the almost unbearable
pathos of the Gretchen tragedy had not
yet found its place in the wider tragedy
of Western man.
Goethe and Schiller blamed the failure
of the journals in which they strove to
propagate their ideals of art and
literature (Goethe's Propyläen,
1798–1800, was a quasi-successor to
Schiller's Horen) on the indifference of
anuncultivated public and vented their
disappointment in Xenien, approximately
400 mordant distichs in the manner of
Martial. A more positive reply to their
detractors was a wonderful harvest of
ballads. Goethe's own—“Der Schatzgräber”
(“The Treasure Digger”), “Die Braut von
Korinth” (“The Bride from Corinth”),
“Der Zauberlehrling” (“The Sorcerer's
Apprentice”)—differ from his earlier
ones in that man rather than nature now
holds sway. The “white” magic of
reflection is consciously, even
ironically, introduced. And in the
ballad, with its blend of lyric, epic,
and dramatic elements, Goethe now
discerned the Urei, or archetypal form,
of poetry by analogy with the Urpflanze
(archetypal plants) he had discovered in
the vegetable world.
Goethe's relation to the Romantics
With Schiller's death in 1805, Goethe
felt he had lost “the half of his
existence,” and he wrote a magnificent
tribute to his great friend in Epilog zu
Schillers Glocke (“Epilogue to
Schiller's Bells”). His intellectual
loneliness was eased in some measure by
his relations to the new school of
Romantics then flourishing in Jena, for
they had much in common. Friedrich von
Schlegel had begun his career with a
book extolling Greek culture and gone on
to praise the Orientas the summit of
Romantic thought and poetry. His brother
Wilhelm's absorption in form and metre
was after Goethe's own heart, and he
could not be indifferent to their
enthusiastic praise of Wilhelm Meister
or to Novalis' description of him as
“the viceregent of poetry upon earth.”
In Bettina Brentano, daughter of his old
love, Maximiliane von La Roche, he found
an ardent response to both his genius
and his humanity, and her Briefwechsel
Goethes mit einem Kinde (1835; “Goethe's
Correspondence with a Child”) remains
one of the most readable books in German
literature, whatever doubts may be cast
on its reliability. Though Goethe
decried the Romantics as “forced
talents,” amateurishly oblivious of the
virtues of form, though he deplored
their catholicizing tendencies, their
uncritical addiction to all things
medieval, their attempts to blur the
literary genres and confuse the
boundaries between art and life, he yet
remained open to many of their
enthusiasms, even letting himself be
moved to a renewed interest in Gothic
architecture. And in Die
Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) he drew
heavily for his thematic material upon
their preoccupation with “the night-side
of nature,” with the animal, magnetic
affinities that attract human beings to
each other, as elements are attracted in
the chemical world.
But this novel offers no support at all
for a superstitious surrender to forces
natural or supernatural, for a subhuman
abdication of moral responsibility.
Catastrophe follows inexorably upon the
arbitrary interpretation of signs and
portents; the heroine enters upon a path
of renunciation thatbrings her near
sainthood; marriage may be presented
with ruthless realism as “a synthesis of
impossibilities,” but it remains
nevertheless “the beginning and end of
all civilization.” The Romantics were
here taught a lesson of social
behaviour—and of artistic form. The
narrative is conducted with a serene
impartiality, and all the classical
values of plasticity, restraint, and
symmetry are brought to bear on a
subject that is sensational to the point
of improbability.
By their translations—Romanticism is
translation, Clemens Brentano
declared—the Romantics were opening up
the literary treasures of the world, and
Weltliteratur was to become one of
Goethe's most treasured concepts. Its
aim was, as he put it, to advance
civilization by encouraging mutual
understanding and respect—whether
through translation or criticism (his
own attempts to interpret Serbianpoetry
to the Germans is an excellent example
of this latter) or through the blending
of different literary traditions. Two
great ballads, “Der Gott und die
Bajadere” (“God and the Dancing Girl”)
and “Paria” (“Outcast”), and two
exquisite cycles, the late and lesser
known Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und
Tageszeiten (“Chinese-German Hours and
Seasons”; 1830) and the West-östlicher
Divan (1819), are hisown outstanding
attempts to marry East with West. This
latter is a book of love in all its
aspects—tender, playful, sensuous,
ironic, wise, and wanton—all of it
irradiated by that quality of Geist—of
intellect, spirit, wit—which he
discerned as “the predominant passion”
of Persian poetry. His living muse this
time, Marianne, the young wife of his
friend von Willemer, was perhaps the
most completely satisfying of all his
loves, so attuned to him in spirit that
she could even take a hand in the
creation of some of these poems.
The last decade
But the world vision of the aging poet
did not only find expression in a silent
communing with the past. In his last
years, Goethe found himself a world
figure, and little Weimar became a Mecca
that drew a constant stream of pilgrims
from both the Old World and the New.
Reports of his stiffness and reserve in
the face of almost daily invasions are
far outweighed by the testimony of those
to whom he showed warmth, understanding,
an insatiable curiosity aboutwhat was
going on in the outside world, and an
abiding openness to the present and the
future. This is nowhere moreapparent
than in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre
(1821–29; “Wilhelm Meister's Travels”),
with its commitment to social and
technological progress (what he would
most like to see before he died, Goethe
once said, was the completion of
thePanama and Suez canals), to a type of
education better adapted to modern
specialization than the old humanistic
studies, to a world no longer centred
wholly in Europe—a major “complication”
of his plot is a resettlement plan for
emigrants in the land of the future
(“Amerika, du hast es besser!”
[“America, you are better off!”]).
Wilhelm Meister points the truth that
mastery of life is not conferred at the
end of the “apprentice years” and
henceforth an inalienable possession,
but a ceaseless wandering in which the
goal turns out to be the way, and the
way the goal.
At first sight the subtitle, Die
Entsagenden (“The Renunciants”), seems
curiously at odds with such
purposefulunrest. But renunciation for
Goethe implies no passive resignation to
the status quo. It is a growing
acceptance of the limits imposed by life
itself, limits arising from the nature
of space and time and from the conflict
of interests and potentialities. The
apparent formlessness of the novel
reflects the duality of its title. It
meanders, its narrative interspersed
with tales, anecdotes, episodes and
maxims, having but the loosest
connection with the plot but a formal,
if often subterranean, connection with
the poetic significance. These
interpolations, like the increasingly
symbolic characters, display the whole
spectrum of human modes of renunciation.
The “whole man” is here representednot
by any single individual but by a
constellation of many, and the informing
principle is the spatial one of
configuration rather than the temporal
one of succession.
Faust, too, is often decried as
formless, though the climate ofcriticism
is now more propitious to the discovery
of its “law.”The array of lyric, epic,
dramatic, operatic, and balletic
elements, of almost every known metre,
from doggerel through terza rima (an
Italian form of iambic verse consisting
of stanzas of three lines) to six-foot
trimeter (a line of verse consisting of
three measures), of styles ranging from
Greek tragedy through medieval mystery,
baroque allegory, Renaissance masque,
commedia dell'arte, and the “temerities
of the English stage,” to something akin
to the modern revue, all suggest a
deliberate attempt to make these various
forms a vehicle of cultural comment
rather than any failure to create a
coherent form of his own. And thecontent
with which Goethe invests his forms
bears this out. He draws on an immense
variety of cultural
material—theological, mythological,
philosophical, political, economic,
scientific, aesthetic, musical,
literary—for the more realistic Part I
no less than for the more symbolic Part
II(first published posthumously in
1832): if Faust's wooing of Helena in
the “Classic-Romantic Phantasmagoria”
(as the first publication of the scene
in 1827 called it) is accomplished by
teaching her the unfamiliar delights of
rhymed verse, his seduction of Gretchen
is firmly set in the long tradition of
erotic mysticism going back to the Song
of Solomon. The Faust myth is here made
the medium of a profoundly serious but
highly ironic commentary on our cultural
heritage, presented not as historical
pageant—Faust's “progress” from his
18th- to 16th-century beginnings back
through the Middle Ages and classical
antiquity to the origins of life, and
beyond that to the “Mothers,” timeless
source of all forms of being, annuls the
historical time sequence—but as a drama
of the diverse potentialities that
coexist in Western civilization.
This Faust, unlike his creator, is the
very type of Western man, with two souls
warring within his breast and a
restlesslyinquiring spirit. To the 19th
century his ceaseless striving seemed a
good thing in itself. To a generation
shocked into doubts about progress and
the value of action, the disastrous
consequences of his attempts to
experience “the weal and woe of all
mankind” (the libido sciendi of
Marlowe'sFaustus is here but briefly
indulged and as swiftly transcended)
loom larger than the quotable “message”
of any of the speeches, and his ultimate
“salvation” becomes correspondingly
suspect. Yet the love that bears his
mortal remains to “higher spheres” does
not mitigate the ironic defeat of his
highest mortal endeavour. If the seal of
approval is set on a spirit that has
eluded Mephisto's every effort to lull
him into sloth, the evil into which it
led him is notcondoned. It needs the
combined intercession of human wisdom
and human suffering, human innocence and
human experience, before compassionate
verdict is passed on the erring and
straying of this soul “in ferment.”
Indeed, none of Goethe's conciliatory
endings, except that of Iphigenie,
really removes the sting of tragedy.
Critics have tended to excuse or deplore
them by reference to his own konziliante
Natur (his “conciliatory nature”). But
at least as relevant is his
preoccupation with the form of Greek
trilogies and tetralogies and his
unorthodox interpretation of Aristotle's
catharsis as an effect only likely to be
produced in the spectator if there is a
corresponding element of
“reconciliation” in the structure of the
play itself. The apotheosis of the hero,
whether Faust's, Egmont's, or
Ottilie'sin the Wahlverwandtschaften, is
always set in a context reminiscent of a
theophany and of the ritual origins of
tragedy.
Nor can his interest in the cathartic
effect of music be ignored. Unlike the
German Romantic poet Novalis, for
whommusic was “the key to the universe,”
Goethe was profoundly aware of its dual
nature and as suspicious as Plato of its
orgiastic power. As in every art he
looked for the taming of the Dionysiac
by the Apolline, nowhere more movingly
symbolized than by the taming of the
lion through the piping of the little
child in his Novelle of 1828, a theme he
had already discussed with Schiller as
far back as 1797. And increasingly he
turned to music for assuagement of his
own suffering. His Trilogie der
Leidenschaft (“Trilogy of Passion”;
1823–27) is at once the lyrical
precipitate of an oldman's anguished
love for a girl of 18 and a tribute to
the cathartic effect of this “heavenly
art,” which restores to life even as it
soothes. His Zauberflöte, Zweiter Teil
is a tribute to his favourite Mozart's
Magic Flute: Mozart would, he thought,
have been the ideal composer for Faust.
And one of the comforts of his later
years was an intimate friendship with
the composer K.F. Zelter, whose most
brilliant pupil, the young Mendelssohn,
afforded him hours of musical delight
and deepened his musical
understanding—though he never succeeded
in reconciling him to the daemonic
aspects of Beethoven's music.
By common consent, Faust is one of the
supreme, if as yet unclassified,
achievements of literature. But there
were moments when Goethe rated his
scientific work higher than all his
poetry. His predilection for his
Farbenlehre (“Theory of Colour”;
1805–10) has something of the love of a
parent for a problem child, and nothing
is easier than for the physicist to pick
holes in his systematic attempt to prove
Newton wrong, or for the psychologist to
find the cause of hisstubbornness in his
sense of mathematical inadequacy or in
his neurotic attachment to the doctrine
that light is one and indivisible and
never to be explained by any theory of
particles. On the other hand, the
usefulness of the Psycho-Physiological
Section, together with his study
Entoptische Farben (“Entoptic Images”),
is generally acknowledged, while the
Historical Section is something of a
pioneer work in the writing of the
history of science. His work in botany
and biology is less controversial. His
Metamorphose der Pflanzen (“Attempt to
Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants”;
1790) is a model of presentation, and
the drawings in it are a botanist's
delight. His main thesis, that all the
parts of the plant are modifications of
a type-leaf, has met with a measure of
acceptance, though his categorical
neglect of the root is regarded as an
unscientific exclusion of a possible
area of relevance. His hypothesis of
atype-plant, by contrast, commands no
interest among orthodox botanists today.
His discovery in 1784, arrived at
independently even if he was not the
first to make it, of a recognizable os
intermaxillare (the premaxilla of modern
anatomists) in the human species was yet
another result of his sustained quest
for unity and continuity in nature and
caused Darwin to hail him as a
forerunner.
But what makes for the continuing
interest of Goethe's science is not his
discoveries: he could not always claim
priority for them at the time, nor was
he in the least interested in doing so.
It is his insight into his methods of
arriving at them. Few have been as aware
of the mental processes involved in the
study of natural phenomena; few have
been more alive to the hazards that
beset the scientist,at every level, from
sheer observation to the construction of
a theory; and few have been more
conscious of the unwittingtheorizing
involved in even the simplest act of
perception. And no one has argued more
convincingly that the only way of coping
with this inescapable involvement of the
observer in the phenomena to be observed
is to let “knowledge of self” develop
with “knowledge of world.”
Such scrupulous awareness of his own
mental operations was, of course, of
paramount importance in morphology, the
science Goethe founded and named.
Morphology, as he understood it, was the
systematic study of formation and
transformation—whether of rocks, clouds,
colours, plants, animals, or the
cultural phenomena of human society—as
these present themselves to sentient
experience. He did not propose it as a
substitute for the quantitative
sciences, which break down forms as we
know them and by converting them into
mathematical terms ensure a measure of
prediction and control. He was not,
contrary to common belief, opposed to
analysis—one of his favourite maxims was
that analysis and synthesis must
alternate as naturally as breathing in
and breathing out—and his only objection
to physics was its increasing tendency
to claim monopoly of understanding. What
he was aiming at was rather a humanizing
supplement, an understanding of nature
in all itsqualitative manifestations;
and one of his most impassionedpleas is
for a concert of all the sciences, a
cooperation of all types of method and
mind.
This impulse, to find a scientific as
well as an aesthetic corrective to the
inevitably esoteric tendencies of
specialization, is nowhere more apparent
than in his two elegies on plant and
animal metamorphosis in which he tries
to present to imagination and feeling
what has been understood by the mind.
They eventually took their place in a
cycle of philosophical poems entitled
Gott und Welt (“God and World”). Though
no orthodox believer, Goethe was by no
means the pure pagan the 19th-century
critics liked to imagine. Spinoza's
pantheism certainly struck a
sympatheticchord, for the Deist idea of
a God who, having created the world,
then left it to revolve, was repugnant
to him. But he was and remained a
grateful heir of the Christian
tradition—bibelfest, rooted in the
Bible—as his language constantly
proclaims. And it was from this centre
that he extended sympathetic
understanding to all other religions,
seeking their common ground without
destroying their individual excellences,
seeing them as different manifestations
of an Ur, or archetypal, religion and
thus giving expression, in this field as
elsewhere, to the essentially
morphological temper of his mind.
“Panentheism” has been proposed as a
more exact term for his belief in a
divinity at once immanent and
transcendent, and he rebuked those who
tried to confine him to one mode of
thought by saying that as poet he was
polytheist, as scientist pantheist, and
that when, as a moral being, he had need
of a personal God, “that too had been
taken care of.” This was one of the
meanings he attached to the biblical
text: “In my father's house are many
mansions.”
Appraisal
A day will come, Carlyle predicted in a
letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, when “you
will find that this sunny-looking
courtly Goethe held veiled in him a
Prophetic sorrow deep as Dante's.” And
since World War II there have been many
attempts to replace the image of the
serene optimist by that of the tortured
skeptic. The one is as inadequate as the
other—as inadequate as T.S. Eliot's
conclusion that he was sage rather than
poet—though this is perhaps inevitable
when a writer is such a master of his
own medium that even his prose proves
resistant to translation. Even his
Werther knew that the realities of
existence are rarely to be grasped by
Either-Or. And the reality of Goethe
himself certainly eludes any such
attempt. If he was a skeptic, and he
often was, he was a hopeful skeptic. He
looked deep into the abyss, but he
deliberately emphasized life and light.
He livedlife to the full at every level,
but never to the detriment of the
civilized virtues. He remained closely
in touch with the richness of his
unconscious mind, but he shed on it the
light of reflection without destroying
the spontaneity of its processes. He
was, as befits a son of the
Enlightenment, wholly committed to the
adventure of science; but he stood in
awe and reverence before the mystery of
the universe. Goethe nowhere formulated
a system of thought. He was asimpatient
of the sterilities of logic chopping as
of the inflations of metaphysics, though
he acknowledged his indebtedness to many
philosophers, including Kant. But here
again he was not to be confined. Truth
for him lay not in compromise but in the
embracing of opposites. And this is
expressed in the form of his Maximen
(“maxims”), which, together with his
Gespräche (“conversations”), contain the
sum of his wisdom. As with proverbs, one
can always find among them a twin that
expresses the complementary opposite.
And they have something of the banality
of proverbs too. But it is, as André
Gide observed, “une banalitésupérieure.”
What makes it “superior” is that the
thought hasbeen felt and lived and that
the formulation betrays this. Andfor all
his specialized talents, there was a
kind of “superior banality” about
Goethe's life. If he himself felt it was
“symbolic” and worth presenting as such
in a series of autobiographical
writings, it was not from arrogance but
from a realization that he was an
extraordinarily ordinary man in whom
ordinary men might see themselves
reflected. Not an ascetic, a mystic, a
saint, or a recluse, not a Don Juan or a
poet's poet but one who to the best of
his ability had tried to achieve the
highest form of l'homme moyen
sensuel—which is perhaps what Napoleon
sensed when aftertheir meeting in Erfurt
he uttered his famous “Voilà un homme!”
Elizabeth M. Wilkinson
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Friedrich von
Schiller
"Love and Intrigue"
German writer
in full Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
born Nov. 10, 1759, Marbach, Württemberg
died May 9, 1805, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar
Main
leading German dramatist, poet, and literary theorist, best remembered
for such dramas as Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers), the Wallenstein
trilogy (1800–01), Maria Stuart (1801), and Wilhelm Tell (1804).
Early years and plays.
Friedrich Schiller was the second child of Lieut. Johann Kaspar Schiller
and his wife, Dorothea. After Johann Kaspar retired from military
service, he devoted himself to horticulture and was appointed
superintendent of the gardens and plantations at Ludwigsburg, the
residence of Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg. Johann Kaspar gave his son
Friedrich a sound grammar school education until the age of 13 when, in
deference to what amounted to a command from his despotic sovereign, he
reluctantly agreed to send his boy to the Military Academy (the
Karlsschule), an institution founded and personally supervised by the
Duke. Against the wishes of the parents, who had hoped to have their son
trained for the ministry, the Duke decreed that young Friedrich was to
prepare for the study of law; later, however, he was allowed to transfer
to medicine. Having endured the irksome regimentation at the academy for
eight years, Schiller left to take up an appointment as an assistant
medical officer to a Stuttgart regiment.
His adolescence under the rule of a petty tyrant confronted Schiller
with the problem of the use and abuse of power, a theme that recurs in
most of his plays. His resentment found expression in some of his early
poems and especially in his first play, Die Räuber, a stirring protest
against stifling convention and corruption in high places. The hero of
the play, Karl Moor, a young man of fiery spirit and abundant vitality,
has led a somewhat disorderly life at the university. His villainous
younger brother Franz poisons their aged father’s mind against the
prodigal elder son. When the old Count Moor disowns Karl, the young man
turns brigand and defies all established authority at the head of a band
of outlaws, until, before long, he discovers that however corrupt the
existing order may be, violence and anarchy do not offer a workable
alternative and society cannot be reformed by terrorism and crime. He
decides to give himself up to justice, thus submitting to the law that
he had flouted. Schiller could therefore claim to have written in
defense of law and morality. At the same time, Karl Moor is represented
as a “sublime criminal,” and the play is a scathing indictment of a
society that could drive so fundamentally noble a character to a career
of crime.
In order to have the play accepted, Schiller had to prepare a stage
version in which the rebellious ardour of his original text was toned
down. Nevertheless, the first performance (Jan. 13, 1782) at the
National Theatre at Mannheim created a sensation; it was a milestone in
the history of the German theatre. Schiller travelled to Mannheim
without the Duke’s permission in order to be present on the first night.
When the Duke heard of this visit, he sentenced the poet to a
fortnight’s detention and forbade him to write any more plays. To escape
from this intolerable situation, Schiller fled from Stuttgart at night
and set out for Mannheim in the hope of receiving help from Heribert
Baron von Dalberg, the director of the theatre that had launched his
first play. He brought with him the manuscript of a new work, Die
Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (1783; Fiesco; or, the Genoese
Conspiracy), subtitled “a republican tragedy”: the drama of the rise and
fall of a would-be dictator, set in 16th-century Genoa, picturing, in
Schiller’s own phrase, “ambition in action, and ultimately defeated.”
The new play was rejected, however, and when Schiller prepared a
revised version with a different ending, this was rejected, too.
Dalberg, not anxious to provoke a diplomatic incident by sheltering a
deserter, kept him at arm’s length. For some tense weeks Schiller led
the hand-to-mouth life of a refugee, until he found a temporary home
with Henriette von Wolzogen, whose sons had been fellow students of his
and who invited him to stay at her house at Bauerbach in Thuringia.
There he finished his third tragedy, Kabale und Liebe (1784; Cabal and
Love). In this work about the love of a young aristocrat for a girl of
humble origin, Schiller’s innate sense of drama comes to the fore. The
appeal of its theme (the revolt of elemental human feeling against the
artificialities of convention), the vigour of its social criticism, and
the vitality of its dialogue and characters combine to make Kabale und
Liebe great theatre.
Dalberg eventually offered Schiller an appointment as resident
playwright with the Mannheim theatre. Schiller accepted and had the
satisfaction of seeing Kabale und Liebe score a resounding success, but
his hopes of clearing his debts and gaining a measure of financial
security were doomed. When his contract expired after a year, it was not
renewed; and once again Schiller needed the help of friends to extricate
him from both his financial predicament and an emotional crisis caused
by his attachment to a married woman, the charming but unstable
Charlotte von Kalb. Schiller moved to Leipzig, where he was befriended
by Christian Gottfried Körner. A man of some means, Körner was able to
support Schiller during his two years’ stay in Saxony, toward the end of
which Don Carlos, his first major drama in iambic pentameter, was
published (1787).
Don Carlos marks a major turning point in Schiller’s development as a
dramatist. On one level, the work is a domestic drama concerned with the
relations between the aging King Philip II of Spain, his third consort,
Elizabeth of Valois, and his son by his first marriage, Don Carlos, who
is in love with his stepmother. The conflict between father and son is
not confined to their private lives, however; it has broad political
implications as well. The change of focus from the domestic to the
political sphere produced a play of inordinate length and a tortuous
plot. But positive qualities compensate for these faults: a wealth of
exciting and moving scenes and a wide range of sharply individualized
characters, the most memorable being the complex, brooding, and tragic
figure of King Philip. The characteristically resonant note of
Schiller’s blank verse is heard here for the first time. Blank verse had
been used by German playwrights before (notably Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
in Nathan der Weise [1779]), but it was Schiller’s Don Carlos, together
with Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787), that definitely established
it as the recognized medium of German poetic drama.
Historical studies.
Schiller had accepted Körner’s generous offer of hospitality and
financial help in the spirit in which it was made. He gave jubilant
expression to his new mood of contentment in his hymn “An die Freude”
(“Ode to Joy”), which Beethoven was to use for the choral movement of
his Ninth Symphony. Schiller could not stay with Körner indefinitely,
however, and in July 1787 Schiller set out for Weimar, in the hope of
meeting some of the men who had made Weimar the literary capital of
Germany. Goethe, who was in Italy at the time, returned to Weimar in the
following year. A chance meeting between Schiller and Goethe in 1794 and
the ensuing exchange of letters mark the beginning of their friendship,
a union of opposites that forms an inspiring chapter in the history of
German letters.
In spite of the initial distance between them, Goethe had recommended
Schiller for appointment to a professorship of history at the University
of Jena, Schiller having presented the requisite credentials in his
Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen
Regierung (1788; “History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands
against the Spanish Government”). His Geschichte des dreissigjährigen
Krieges (1791–93; “History of the Thirty Years’ War”) further enhanced
his prestige as a historian; later it also provided him with the
material for his greatest drama, Wallenstein, published in 1800.
In 1790 Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeld, a cultured young
woman of good family, who bore him two sons and two daughters. In the
second year of their married life, Schiller’s health gave way under the
strain of perpetual overwork. For a time he lay critically ill, and,
although he rallied after several relapses, he never fully recovered
from a combination of chest trouble and digestive disorder that proved
intractable. The rest of his life was a losing battle, fought with
superb fortitude, against the inexorable advance of disease.
Philosophical studies and classical drama.
Calamitous as Schiller’s illness was, it produced a piece of great good
luck. To give him time to recuperate at leisure, two Danish patrons
granted him a generous pension for three years. Schiller decided to
devote part of this time to studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. As
he proceeded to assimilate Kant’s views, he soon felt the urge to
formulate his own. The encounter with Kant’s philosophy thus produced
between 1793 and 1801 a series of essays in which Schiller sought to
define the character of aesthetic activity, its function in society, and
its relation to moral experience: the essays on moral grace and dignity,
“Über Anmut und Würde,” and on the sublime, “Über das Erhabene,” as well
as the celebrated essay on the distinction between two types of poetic
creativity, “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.” The latter, like
his letters on the aesthetic education of man, “Briefe über die
ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen,” first appeared in Die Horen, an
ambitious but short-lived literary periodical edited by Schiller and
published by Johann Friedrich Cotta, one of Germany’s leading
publishers, whom Schiller had met during a visit to his native Swabia in
1793–94.
This period of critical stocktaking also produced some exquisite
reflective poems: “Das Ideal und das Leben” (“Life and the Ideal”), “Der
Spaziergang” (“The Walk”), “Die Macht des Gesanges” (“The Power of
Song”). These are “philosophical lyrics” in the true sense: not
versified philosophy, but poetic utterance inspired by an intellectual
experience. They contain the quintessence of Schiller’s philosophical
and critical thinking, and they are among his best poems, but they are
poems for the few. On the other hand, the ballads written in 1797
(including “Der Handschuh” [“The Glove”], “Der Taucher” [“The Diver”],
and “Die Kraniche des Ibykus” [“The Cranes of Ibycus”]) are among his
most popular productions. In these poems and in the famous “Lied von der
Glocke” (“The Song of the Bell”) Schiller shows how to make poetry
accessible to the man in the street without debasing it.
In the Wallenstein cycle—a work on the grand scale, consisting of a
prefatory poem, a dramatic prologue, and two five-act plays—Schiller
reached the height of his powers as a dramatist. The play portrays
Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, the commander-in-chief of the
armies of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. Against
the sombre background of the war there rises the sinister figure of
Wallenstein, who in his secret heart is meditating high treason: by
joining forces with the enemy, he hopes to make himself the arbiter of
the empire. Wallenstein sees himself as a privileged being, a superman
beyond good and evil, the man of destiny. While these traits repel, his
bearing in the hour of crisis compels admiration and even wins a measure
of sympathy. His portrayal is a profound study of the lure and the
perils of power.
Working against time, Schiller produced four more plays in quick
succession: Maria Stuart (first performed in 1800), a psychological
drama concerned with the moral rebirth of Mary, Queen of Scots; Die
Jungfrau von Orleans (1801; The Maid of Orleans), a “romantic tragedy”
on the subject of Joan of Arc, in which the heroine dies in a blaze of
glory after a victorious battle, rather than at the stake like her
historical prototype; Die Braut von Messina (1803; The Bride of
Messina), written in emulation of Greek drama, with its important
preface, Schiller’s last critical pronouncement); and Wilhelm Tell
(1804; William Tell), which depicts the revolt of the Swiss forest
cantons against Habsburg rule and the assassination of a tyrannous
Austrian governor by the hero, with the underlying question of the play
being the justifiability of violence in political action.
Each of these plays of Schiller’s classical period has its own
distinctive merit, but as a piece of dramatic craftsmanship Maria Stuart
surpasses the rest. The action of the play is compressed into the last
three days in Mary’s life, before her execution at Fotheringhay; all the
antecedents—her French marriage, her brief and troubled Scottish reign,
her long imprisonment in England—emerge by means of retrospective
analysis. Although Schiller repeatedly diverged from the recorded facts
in his treatment of the subject, he displays in his play a profound
grasp of the historical situation. Schiller offers a disturbing analysis
of the problems that arise whenever political expediency masquerades as
justice and judges are subjected to the pressures of power politics or
ideological conflict. Mary turns outward disaster into inward triumph by
accepting the verdict of the English tribunal—which she regards as
unjust—in expiation of her sins committed in former days. By giving to
the decree of her judges a meaning that they had not intended, she rises
superior to their jurisdiction, a sinner redeemed and transfigured. This
conforms to Schiller’s theory of tragedy, which turns on the hero’s
moral rebirth through an act of voluntary self-abnegation.
Schiller was ennobled (with the addition of a von to his name) in
1802. Death overtook him in 1805 while he was working at a new play on a
Russian theme, Demetrius (1805). Judging by the fragments that remain,
it might well have developed into a masterpiece.
Assessment.
“The idea of freedom,” Goethe said, “assumed a different form as
Schiller advanced in his own development and became a different man. In
his youth it was physical freedom that preoccupied him and found its way
into his works; in later life it was spiritual freedom.” Schiller’s
early tragedies are attacks upon political oppression and the tyranny of
social convention; his later plays are concerned with the inward freedom
of the soul that enables a man to rise superior to the frailties of the
flesh and to the pressure of material conditions; they show the hero
torn between the claims of this world and the demands of an eternal
moral order, striving to keep his integrity in the conflict. In his
reflective poems and in his treatises, Schiller sets out to show how art
can help man to attain this inner harmony and how, through the
“aesthetic education” of the individual citizen, a happier, more humane
social order may develop. His reflections on aesthetics thus link up
with his political and historical thinking.
One of the most striking features of Schiller’s oeuvre is its
modernity, its startling relevance to the life of the 20th century.
Although for a time he fell out of favour with the German
intelligentsia, the enduring value of his work is not likely to be
obscured by fashions in criticism.
William Witte
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Post-Classicism
Goethe and the
Romantics
In the years after
Schiller’s
death in 1805,
Goethe
developed a style that was in some ways Romantic,
but he nevertheless maintained a distance from the
younger generation of Romanticists. He shared their
interest in Greek antiquity but not their
nationalist politics, their inclination toward
Catholicism, or their idealization of the Middle
Ages.
Goethe’s
novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective
Affinities), with its emphasis on the supranatural
and spiritual as well as on the sainthood of the
female protagonist, is an example of this new style.
Another example is Part II of his Faust drama. This
sprawling cosmic allegory dramatizes the magician’s
career at the emperor’s court, his ventures into
Classical Greece and union with Helen of Troy, and
his final salvation in a scene of mountain gorges,
replete with Catholic saints, including the Holy
Virgin.
Goethe’s
poetry of this period was characterized by
exoticism, an assimilation of foreign genres and
styles, such as those of Chinese or, especially,
Persian poetry. His West-östlicher Divan (1819;
Poems of the West and the East) is a collection of
poetry in imitation of Hafez and other Persian
poets. Sharing this exoticism with the Romantics,
Goethe
nevertheless was able to adapt the mode to his own
expressive needs. With his continuation of Wilhelm
Meister as an archival novel in Wilhelm Meisters
Wanderjahre,
Goethe
approached 20th-century Modernism.
Jean Paul,
Friedrich
Hölderlin, and Heinrich von Kleist
Three other writers belonging to this post-Classical
period are Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich
Richter),
Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich von
Kleist. Often referred to as Romantics, they
stood in an ambiguous relation to Goethe, one
compounded of admiration and antagonism. Both
Hölderlin
and Kleist shared Goethe’s interest in Greek
antiquity, while Jean Paul with his eccentric
and discursive novels was a German successor to the
18th-century English novelist Laurence Sterne.
Jean Paul
was opposed to Goethe and Schiller as well as to the
Romantics, and with his humour he tried to maintain
a middle path between the opposing schools of
literature. Neither of his two major novels,
Siebenkäs (1796–97; title is the hero’s name) and
Titan (1800–03), qualifies as a bildungsroman.
Siebenkäs is the story of a poor man’s lawyer who
attempts to escape his marital problems by
simulating death, and Titan has a number of
protagonists with titanic ambitions defying the very
model of balanced Bildung in the Goethean sense.
Hölderlin
was able to revive with considerable success genres
of Greek poetry—the Horatian ode, the elegy, and the
Pindaric ode—in German literature and to fuse his
love for his native land with the longing for
ancient Greece. His epistolary novel Hyperion; oder,
der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–99; Hyperion; or,
The Hermit in Greece) integrates ideals of Platonic
philosophy into a revolutionary concern for the
restoration of the ancient poetical and intellectual
grandeur of a Greece that had come under Turkish
domination.
Kleist
pushed beyond the borders of Weimar Classicism with
his dramas on Greek subjects (Amphitryon in 1807 and
Penthesilea in 1808) and his historical dramas (Die
Hermannsschlacht, or “Hermann’s Battle,” dealing
with the defeat of the Romans by Germanic tribes
under Arminius [Hermann] in ad 9, and Prinz
Friedrich von Homburg, a play about the conflict of
Prussian military law and human compassion; both
plays were posthumously published in 1821), while
his novellas (Erzählungen, 1810–11; Eng. trans. The
Marquise of O– and Other Stories) are remarkable for
their classical mastery of form and subject matter.
In Kleist’s tale Das Erdbeben in Chili (“The
Earthquake in Chile”), from the Erzählungen volume,
a nun (who has borne a child) and her lover are
saved from execution and suicide, respectively, by
an earthquake that destroys all of Santiago and
their persecutors. They perceive the cataclysm as an
act of redemptive grace sent by God. But their
illusions of divine grace are shattered when a
churchman incites a frightened mob to slay the two
“sinners” (whose misdeed is understood to have
caused the earthquake). The Erzählungen story Die
Marquise von O– begins when a reputable young woman
places an ad in the newspaper asking the father of
the child she is bearing to make his identity known
to her; she has become pregnant without her own
knowledge or conscious participation. The theme of
Michael Kohlhaas, also in Erzählungen, is the
unbending search for justice of a wronged man who
destroys himself seeking redress.
Kleist was
more affected by the violence of his period than any
other German writer and made the display of violence
a central topic of his works. In his drama Die
Hermannsschlacht and his Erzählungen novella Die
Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in Santo
Domingo), the concept of violence as a just means in
the fight against imperialism takes on strong
anti-French overtones, reflecting the emergence of
modern German nationalism in the wars against
Napoleon. Nationalism links Kleist to the Romantic
Movement, which made a fierce and revolutionary
patriotism into one of its programmatic features.
Ehrhard Bahr
Jean Paul
pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich
Richter
born March 21, 1763, Wunsiedel,
Principality of Bayreuth [Germany]
died Nov. 14, 1825, Bayreuth, Bavaria
German novelist and humorist whose works
were immensely popular in the first 20
years of the 19th century. His pen name,
Jean Paul, reflected his admiration for
the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Jean Paul’s writing bridged the shift in
literature from the formal ideals of
Weimar Classicism to the intuitive
transcendentalism of early Romanticism.
Jean Paul, the son of a poor teacher
and pastor, studied theology at Leipzig
but soon gave up his studies for
freelance writing. He published two
collections of satiric essays in the
style of Jonathan Swift, Grönländische
Prozesse (1783; The Greenland Lawsuits)
and Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren
(1789; “Selection from the Devil’s
Papers”), but these were unsuccessful,
and he was forced to support himself as
a private tutor (1787–90) and
schoolmaster (1790–94). About 1790 a
personal crisis prompted him to forsake
bitter satire for sentimental humour in
his writings, and Laurence Sterne
replaced Swift as his model. His
reputation began with the sentimental
novel Die unsichtbare Loge, 2 parts
(1793; The Invisible Lodge), and was
established by Hesperus (1795). He
became a celebrity and was lionized by
the critic Johann Herder and by a
patron, Frau von Kalb, who brought him
to Weimar. In 1801 he married Karoline
Mayer and in 1804 settled in Bayreuth,
his home for the rest of his life.
The second period in Jean Paul’s work
is marked by his attempts to reconcile
the comic satirist and the sentimental
enthusiast in himself. The novels of
this period include Blumen-, Frucht-,
und Dornenstücke, 3 vol. (1796; Flower,
Fruit and Thorn Pieces), commonly known
as Siebenkäs, for its hero; Leben des
Quintus Fixlein (1796; “Life of Quintus
Fixlein”); Titan, 4 vol. (1800–03),
which he considered his classical
masterpiece; and the unfinished
Flegeljahre, 4 vol. (1804–05;
“Adolescence,” Eng. trans. Walt and Vult).
The novels of his third period mirror
his disillusionment with both Classicism
and Romanticism. But his idyllic novels,
always marked by humour, treat his
predicament in a comic style. The forced
figurative style of his earliest books
had become second nature by this time;
he thought, talked, and wrote wittily.
Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise, 2 vol.
(1809; “Dr. Katzenberger’s Journey to
the Spa”), and Des Feldpredigers
Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz (1809; Army
Chaplain Schmelzle’s Journey to Flätz)
were the last of his extremely popular
novels. In 1808 he received a pension
from Prince Karl Theodore von Dalberg,
later paid by the Bavarian government,
which guaranteed him financial security.
He continued to write novels and
treatises on education and aesthetics.
Jean Paul’s novels are peculiar
combinations of sentiment, irony, and
humour expressed in a highly subjective
and involuted prose style that is marked
by rapid transitions of mood. His books
are formless, lacking in action, and
studded with whimsical digressions, but
to some extent they are redeemed by the
author’s profuse imagination and equal
capacity for realistic detail and
dreamlike fantasy. One favourite theme
is the tragicomic clash between the
soul’s infinite aspirations and the
trivial restrictions of everyday life.
Jean Paul greatly influenced his
contemporaries by his simple piety,
humanity and warmth, his religious
attitude toward nature, and his
beguiling mixture of sentimentality,
fantasy, and humour. After the mid-19th
century the unevenness and undisciplined
form of his novels began to detract
rather than add to his reputation, but
the deep humanity of his finest works
has preserved them from oblivion.
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Friedrich Hölderlin
"Poems"
in full Johann Christian Friedrich
Hölderlin
born March 20, 1770, Lauffen am
Neckar, Württemberg [Germany]
died June 7, 1843, Tübingen
German lyric poet who succeeded in
naturalizing the forms of classical
Greek verse in German and in melding
Christian and classical themes.
Hölderlin was born in a little
Swabian town on the River Neckar. His
father died in 1772, and two years
afterward his mother married the
burgomaster of the town of Nürtingen,
where Friedrich attended school. But his
mother was again widowed, in 1779, and
left alone to bring up her family—which
included Friedrich, his sister Heinrike,
and his half-brother Karl. His mother, a
parson’s daughter and a woman of simple
and rather narrow piety, wanted
Friedrich to enter the service of the
church. Candidates for the ministry
received free education, and accordingly
he was sent first to the “monastery
schools” (so called since
pre-Reformation times) at Denkendorf and
Maulbronn and subsequently (1788–93) to
the theological seminary in the
University of Tübingen, where he
obtained his master’s degree and
qualified for ordination.
Hölderlin could not, however, bring
himself to enter the ministry.
Contemporary Protestant theology, an
uneasy compromise between faith and
reason, offered him no safe spiritual
anchorage, while acceptance of Christian
dogma was not wholly compatible with his
devotion to Greek mythology, which made
him see the gods of Greece as real
living forces whose presence manifests
itself to humans in sun and earth, sea
and sky. The strain of divided
allegiance remained a permanent
condition of his existence. Although he
did not feel called to be a Lutheran
pastor, Hölderlin did have a strong
sense of religious vocation; for him,
being a poet meant exercising the
priestly function of mediator between
gods and humans.
In 1793, through Friedrich Schiller’s
recommendation, Hölderlin obtained the
first of several posts as a tutor (in
most of which he failed to give
satisfaction). Schiller befriended the
younger man in other ways too; in his
periodical Neue Thalia, he published
some of the poetry that Hölderlin had
written, as well as a fragment of his
novel Hyperion. This elegiac story of a
disillusioned fighter for the liberation
of Greece remained unfinished. Hölderlin
held Schiller in great reverence; he saw
him again when in 1794 he left his
tutor’s post in order to move to Jena.
His early poems clearly reveal
Schiller’s influence, and several of
them acclaim the new world the French
Revolution had seemed to promise in its
early stages: they include hymns to
freedom, to humanity, to harmony, to
friendship, and to nature.
In December 1795 Hölderlin accepted a
post as tutor in the house of J.F.
Gontard, a wealthy Frankfurt banker.
Before long, Hölderlin fell deeply in
love with his employer’s wife, Susette,
a woman of great beauty and sensibility,
and his affection was returned. In a
letter to his friend C.L. Neuffer
(February 1797), he described their
relationship as “an everlasting happy
sacred friendship with a being who has
really strayed into this miserable
century.” Susette appears in his poems
and in his novel Hyperion, the second
volume of which appeared in 1799, under
the Greek name of “Diotima”—a
reincarnation of the spirit of ancient
Greece. Their happiness was short-lived;
after a painful scene with Susette’s
husband, Hölderlin had to leave
Frankfurt (September 1798).
Though physically and mentally
shaken, Hölderlin finished the second
volume of Hyperion and began a tragedy,
Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of
Empedocles), the first version of which
he nearly completed; fragments of a
second and a third version have also
survived. Symptoms of great nervous
irritability alarmed his family and
friends. Nevertheless, the years
1798–1801 were a period of intense
creativity; in addition to a number of
noble odes, they produced the great
elegies “Menons Klagen um Diotima” (“Menon’s
Lament for Diotima”) and “Brod und Wein”
(“Bread and Wine”). In January 1801 he
went to Switzerland as tutor to a family
in Hauptwyl, but in April of the same
year Hölderlin returned to Nürtingen.
Late in 1801 he once more accepted a
post as tutor, this time at Bordeaux,
France. But in May 1802, after only a
few months in this position, Hölderlin
suddenly left Bordeaux and traveled
homeward on foot through France. On his
way to Nürtingen he received news that
Susette had died in June; when he
arrived he was completely destitute and
suffering from an advanced stage of
schizophrenia. He seemed to recover
somewhat as a result of the kind and
gentle treatment he received at home.
The poems of the period 1802–06,
including “Friedensfeier” (“Celebration
of Peace”), “Der Einzige” (“The Only
One”), and “Patmos,” products of a mind
on the verge of madness, are apocalyptic
visions of unique grandeur. He also
completed verse translations of
Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus
Tyrannus, published in 1804. In this
year a devoted friend, Isaak von
Sinclair, obtained for him the sinecure
post of librarian to the landgrave
Frederick V of Hesse-Homburg. Sinclair
himself provided a modest salary, and
Hölderlin improved noticeably under his
care and companionship. In 1805 Sinclair
(who refused to believe that Hölderlin
was insane) was falsely accused of
subversive activities and held in
custody for five months. By the time he
was released, Hölderlin had succumbed
irretrievably and, after a spell in a
clinic in Tübingen, was moved to a
carpenter’s house, where he lived for
the next 36 years.
Hölderlin gained little recognition
during his lifetime and was almost
totally forgotten for nearly 100 years.
It was not until the early years of the
20th century that he was rediscovered in
Germany and that his reputation as one
of the outstanding lyric poets in the
German language was established in
Europe. Today he is ranked among the
greatest of German poets, especially
admired for his uniquely expressive
style: like no one before or since, he
succeeded in naturalizing the forms of
classical Greek verse in the German
language. With passionate intensity he
strove to reconcile the Christian faith
with the religious spirit and beliefs of
ancient Greece; he was a prophet of
spiritual renewal, of “the return of the
gods”—utterly dedicated to his art,
hypersensitive, and therefore
exceptionally vulnerable. In the end his
mind gave way under the strains and
frustrations of his existence.
William Witte
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Heinrich von Kleist
in full Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von
Kleist
born October 18, 1777, Frankfurt an
der Oder, Brandenburg [now in Germany]
died November 21, 1811, Wannsee, near
Berlin
German dramatist, among the greatest of
the 19th century. Poets of the Realist,
Expressionist, Nationalist, and
Existentialist movements in France and
Germany saw their prototype in Kleist, a
poet whose demonic genius had foreseen
modern problems of life and literature.
Having grown up in military
surroundings, Kleist became dissatisfied
with the career of an army officer,
which had been chosen for him, and
resigned his commission after “the loss
of seven valuable years.” For a time he
studied law and mathematics, but his
reading of the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant destroyed his faith in the value of
knowledge. Despairing of reason, he
decided to place his trust in emotion.
The unresolved conflict between them
lies at the heart of his work.
After Kleist had abandoned his
studies, he went first to Paris and then
to Switzerland. There he wrote his first
work, the tragedy Die Familie
Schroffenstein (1803; “The
Schroffenstein Family”), which depicts
pathological states with ruthless
clarity. Underlying this drama of error
is Kleist’s recurring theme, the
fallibility of human perception and the
inability of the human intellect by
itself to apprehend truth. At this time
he was also working on the play Robert
Guiskard, an ambitious work in which he
attempted to unite ancient Sophoclean
tragedy and the Shakespearean drama of
character, but it would remain a
fragment. He set out on a new journey
and in Paris, overcome by despair,
burned his manuscript of Guiskard
(though he partially rewrote it later)
and tried to volunteer for the French
army. Expelled from France, he traveled
to East Prussia and applied for a
civil-service post in Königsberg. He
resigned during training, however, and
left for Dresden, where he hoped to
continue writing, but was arrested by
the French and imprisoned for six months
as a spy.
In Dresden (1807–09) he became a
member of a large circle of writers,
painters, and patrons and, with the
political philosopher Adam Müller,
published the periodical Phöbus, which
lasted only a few months. While he was
in prison his adaptation of Molière’s
Amphitryon (published 1807) attracted
some attention, and in 1808 he published
Penthesilia, a tragic drama about the
passionate love of the queen of the
Amazons for Achilles. Although this play
received little acclaim, it is now
thought to contain some of Kleist’s most
powerful poetry, with the grimness of
plot and intensity of feeling that have
made his place unique among German
poets. In March 1808 Kleist’s one-act
comedy in verse, Der zerbrochene Krug
(The Broken Pitcher), was unsuccessfully
produced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
in Weimar. The play employs vividly
portrayed rustic characters, skillful
dialogue, earthy humour, and subtle
realism in its depiction of the
fallibility of human feeling and the
flaws inherent in human justice. It
ranks among the masterpieces of German
dramatic comedy. Toward the end of 1808,
inspired by a threatened rising against
Napoleon, Kleist wrote some savage war
poems and a political and patriotic
tragedy, Die Hermannsschlacht (1821;
“Hermann’s Battle”), and in 1809
attempted to found a political
periodical that would call all Germany
to arms. Between 1810 and 1811 his Das
Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810; Katherine
of Heilbronn), a drama set in Swabia
during the Middle Ages, was performed in
Vienna, Graz, and Bamberg. But the
Berlin stage remained closed to him.
Kleist also wrote eight masterly
novellas, collected in Erzählungen
(1810–11), of which “Das Erdbeben in
Chili” (“The Earthquake in Chile”),
“Michael Kohlhaas,” and “Die Marquise
von O…” have become well-known as tales
of violence and mystery. They are all
characterized by an extraordinary
economy, power, and vividness and by a
tragic subject matter in which men are
driven to the limits of their endurance
by the violence of other men or of
nature. Kleist’s last drama, Prinz
Friedrich von Homburg (published
posthumously in 1821 by Ludwig Tieck),
is a brilliant psychological drama. The
play’s problematical hero is Kleist’s
finest figure, reflecting Kleist’s own
conflicts between heroism and cowardice,
dreaming and action.
For six months Kleist had edited the
daily newspaper Berliner Abendblätter,
and, when it ceased publication, he lost
his means of livelihood. Disappointed in
life and embittered by the lack of
recognition accorded him by his
contemporaries, particularly Goethe, he
came to know an incurably sick woman,
Henriette Vogel, who begged him to kill
her. This gave Kleist the final
incentive to end his life, and on
November 21, 1811, he shot Henriette and
himself on the shore of the Wannsee.
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APPENDIX
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Rudolf Erich
Raspe
"The Surprising
Adventures of Baron Munchausen"
PART I,
PART II
Rudolf Erich Raspe (March 1736 – November 1794)
was a German librarian, writer and scientist,
and he was called by his biographer John
Carswell a "rogue". He is best known for his
collection of tall tales, The Surprising
Adventures of Baron Munchausen, originally a
satirical work with political aims.
Raspe was born
in Hanover, studied law and jurisprudence at
Göttingen and Leipzig and worked as a librarian
for the university of Göttingen. From 1767 he
was responsible for some collections of
Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (or
Hesse-Cassel), before having to flee to England
in 1775 after pilfering some gems that were
supposedly in his care. He was employed by
Matthew Boulton in mines in Cornwall. At the
same time, he also authored books in geology and
the history of art. The Trewhiddle Ingot, found
in 2003, is a 150-year-old lump of tungsten
found at Trewhiddle Farm. This may predate the
earliest known smelting of the metal (which
requires extremely high temperatures) and has
led to speculation that it may have been
produced during a visit by Rudolf Erich Raspe to
Happy-Union mine (at nearby Pentewan) in the
late eighteenth century. Raspe was also a
chemist with a particular interest in
tungsten.[1][2] He also worked for the famous
publisher John Nichols in several projects. In
1791 he moved to Scotland, and after an
involvement in a mining swindle there (salting a
mine), he left. He finally moved to Ireland
where he managed a copper mine on the Herbert
Estate in Killarney. He died in Killarney,
County Kerry, of typhoid, in November 1794.
The Baron
Munchausen tales were made famous when they were
'borrowed', translated into German, and
embellished somewhat by Gottfried August Bürger
in 1786--and have been among the favourite
reading of subsequent generations, as well as
the basis of several films, including Terry
Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
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Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
German philosopher
born July 17, 1714, Berlin, Prussia [Germany]
died May 26, 1762, Frankfurt an der Oder
Main
German philosopher and educator who coined the term
aesthetics and established this discipline as a distinct
field of philosophical inquiry.
As a student at Halle, Baumgarten was strongly influenced
by the works of G.W. Leibniz and by Christian Wolff, a
professor and systematic philosopher. He was appointed
extraordinary professor at Halle in 1737 and advanced to
ordinary professor at Frankfurt an der Oder in 1740.
Baumgarten’s most significant work, written in Latin, was
Aesthetica, 2 vol. (1750–58). The problems of aesthetics had
been treated by others before Baumgarten, but he both
advanced the discussion of such topics as art and beauty and
set the discipline off from the rest of philosophy. His
student G.F. Meier (1718–77), however, assisted him to such
an extent that credit for certain contributions is difficult
to assess. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who used Baumgarten’s
Metaphysica (1739) as a text for lecturing, borrowed
Baumgarten’s term aesthetics but applied it to the entire
field of sensory experience. Only later was the term
restricted to the discussion of beauty and of the nature of
the fine arts.
In Baumgarten’s theory, with its characteristic emphasis
on the importance of feeling, much attention was
concentrated on the creative act. For him it was necessary
to modify the traditional claim that “art imitates nature”
by asserting that artists must deliberately alter nature by
adding elements of feeling to perceived reality. In this
way, the creative process of the world is mirrored in their
own activity.
Baumgarten wrote Ethica Philosophica (1740; “Philosophic
Ethic”), Acroasis Logica (1761; “Discourse on Logic”), Jus
Naturae (1763; “Natural Law”), Philosophia Generalis (1770;
“General Philosophy”), and Praelectiones Theologicae (1773;
“Lectures on Theology”). His brother, Siegmund Jakob
Baumgarten, was an influential Wolffian theologian.
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Immanuel Kant
"Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals"
"THE METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF ETHICS"
"FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS"
"THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON"
"THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON"
German philosopher
born April 22, 1724, Königsberg, Prussia [now
Kaliningrad, Russia]
died February 12, 1804, Königsberg
Main
German philosopher whose comprehensive and systematic work
in the theory of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics greatly
influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various
schools of Kantianism and Idealism.
Kant was the foremost thinker of the Enlightenment and
one of the greatest philosophers of all time. In him were
subsumed new trends that had begun with the Rationalism
(stressing reason) of René Descartes and the Empiricism
(stressing experience) of Francis Bacon. He thus inaugurated
a new era in the development of philosophical thought.
Background and early years
Kant lived in the remote province where he was born for his
entire life. His father, a saddler, was, according to Kant,
a descendant of a Scottish immigrant, although scholars have
found no basis for this claim; his mother, an uneducated
German woman, was remarkable for her character and natural
intelligence. Both parents were devoted followers of the
Pietist branch of the Lutheran Church, which taught that
religion belongs to the inner life expressed in simplicity
and obedience to moral law. The influence of their pastor
made it possible for Kant—the fourth of nine children, but
the eldest surviving child—to obtain an education.
At the age of eight Kant entered the Pietist school that
his pastor directed. This was a Latin school, and it was
presumably during the eight and a half years he was there
that Kant acquired his lifelong love for the Latin classics,
especially for the naturalistic poet Lucretius. In 1740 he
enrolled in the University of Königsberg as a theological
student. But, although he attended courses in theology and
even preached on a few occasions, he was principally
attracted to mathematics and physics. Aided by a young
professor who had studied Christian Wolff, a systematizer of
Rationalist philosophy, and who was also an enthusiast for
the science of Sir Isaac Newton, Kant began reading the work
of the English physicist and, in 1744, started his first
book, dealing with a problem concerning kinetic forces.
Though by that time he had decided to pursue an academic
career, the death of his father in 1746 and his failure to
obtain the post of undertutor in one of the schools attached
to the university compelled him to withdraw and seek a means
of supporting himself.
Background and early years » Tutor and Privatdozent
He found employment as a family tutor and, during the nine
years that he gave to it, worked for three different
families. With them he was introduced to the influential
society of the city, acquired social grace, and made his
farthest travels from his native city—some 60 miles (96
kilometres) away to the town of Arnsdorf. In 1755, aided by
the kindness of a friend, he was able to complete his degree
at the university and take up the position of Privatdozent,
or lecturer.
Three dissertations that he presented on obtaining this
post indicate the interest and direction of his thought at
this time. In one, De Igne (On Fire), he argued that bodies
operate on one another through the medium of a uniformly
diffused elastic and subtle matter that is the underlying
substance of both heat and light. His first teaching was in
mathematics and physics, and he was never to lose his
interest in scientific developments. That it was more than
an amateur interest is shown by his publication within the
next few years of several scientific works dealing with the
different races of men, the nature of winds, the causes of
earthquakes, and the general theory of the heavens.
At this period Newtonian physics was important to Kant as
much for its philosophical implications as for its
scientific content. A second dissertation, the Monodologia
physica (1756), contrasted the Newtonian methods of thinking
with those employed in the philosophy then prevailing in
German universities. This was the philosophy of Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, a universal scholar, as systematized and
popularized by Wolff and by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten,
author of a widely used text, the Metaphysica (1739).
Leibniz’ works as they are now known were not fully
available to these writers; and the Leibnizian philosophy
that they presented was extravagantly Rationalistic,
abstract, and cut-and-dried. It nevertheless remained a
powerful force, and the main efforts of independent thinkers
in Germany at the time were devoted to examining Leibniz’s
ideas.
In a third dissertation, Principiorum Primorum
Cognitionis Metaphysicae Nova Dilucidato (1755), on the
first principles of metaphysics, Kant analyzed especially
the principle of sufficient reason, which, in Wolff’s
formulation, asserts that for everything there is a
sufficient reason why it should be rather than not be.
Although critical, Kant was cautious and still a long way
from challenging the assumptions of Leibnizian metaphysics.
During the 15 years that he spent as a Privatdozent,
Kant’s renown as a teacher and writer steadily increased.
Soon he was lecturing on many subjects other than physics
and mathematics—including logic, metaphysics, and moral
philosophy. He even lectured on fireworks and fortifications
and every summer for 30 years taught a popular course on
physical geography. He enjoyed great success as a lecturer;
his lecturing style, which differed markedly from that of
his books, was humorous and vivid, enlivened by many
examples from his reading in English and French literature,
and in travel and geography, science and philosophy.
Although he twice failed to obtain a professorship at
Königsberg, he refused to accept offers that would have
taken him elsewhere—including the professorship of poetry at
Berlin that would have brought greater prestige. He
preferred the peace and quiet of his native city in which to
develop and mature his own philosophy.
Background and early years » Critic of Leibnizian
Rationalism
During the 1760s he became increasingly critical of
Leibnizianism. According to one of his students, Kant was
then attacking Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, was a
declared follower of Newton, and expressed great admiration
for the moral philosophy of the Romanticist Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.
His principal work of this period was Untersuchung über
die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie
und der Moral (1764; “An Inquiry into the Distinctness of
the Fundamental Principles of Natural Theology and Morals”).
In this work he attacked the claim of Leibnizian philosophy
that philosophy should model itself on mathematics and aim
at constructing a chain of demonstrated truths based on
self-evident premises. Kant argued that mathematics proceeds
from definitions that are arbitrary, by means of operations
that are clearly and sharply defined, upon concepts that can
be exhibited in concrete form. In contrast with this method,
he argued that philosophy must begin with concepts that are
already given, “though confusedly or insufficiently
determined,” so that philosophers cannot begin with
definitions without thereby shutting themselves up within a
circle of words. Philosophy cannot, like mathematics,
proceed synthetically; it must analyze and clarify. The
importance of the moral order, which he had learned from
Rousseau, reinforced the conviction received from his study
of Newton that a synthetic philosophy is empty and false.
Besides attacking the methods of the Leibnizians, he also
began criticizing their leading ideas. In an essay Versuch,
den Begriff der negativen Grössen in die Weltweisheit
ein-zuführen (1763), he argued that physical opposition as
encountered in things cannot be reduced to logical
contradiction, in which the same predicate is both affirmed
and denied, and, hence, that it is pointless to reduce
causality to the logical relation of antecedent and
consequent. In an essay of the same year, Der einzig
mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseyns
Gottes, he sharply criticized the Leibnizian concept of
Being by charging that the so-called ontological argument,
which would prove the existence of God by logic alone, is
fallacious because it confuses existential with attributive
statements: existence, he declared, is not a predicate of
attribution. Moreover, with regard to the nature of space,
Kant sided with Newton in his confrontation with Leibniz.
Leibniz’ view that space is “an order of co-existences” and
that spatial differences can be stated in conceptual terms,
he concluded to be untenable.
Some indication of a possible alternative of Kant’s own
to the Leibnizian position can be gathered from his curious
Träume eines Geistersehers erläutert durch Träume der
Metaphysik (1766). This work is an examination of the whole
notion of a world of spirits, in the context of an inquiry
into the spiritualist claims of Emanuel Swedenborg, a
scientist and biblical scholar. Kant’s position at first
seems to have been completely skeptical, and the influence
of the Scottish Skeptic David Hume is more apparent here
than in any previous work; it was Hume, he later claimed,
who first awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers. Yet Kant was
not so much arguing that the notion of a world of spirits is
illusory as insisting that men have no insight into the
nature of such a world, a conclusion that has devastating
implications for metaphysics as the Leibnizians conceived
it. Metaphysicians can dream as well as spiritualists, but
this is not to say that their dreams are necessarily empty;
there are already hints that moral experience can give
content to the ideal of an “intelligible world.” Rousseau
thus acted upon Kant here as a counterinfluence to Hume.
Background and early years » Early years of the
professorship at Königsberg
Finally, in 1770, after serving for 15 years as a
Privatdozent, Kant was appointed to the chair of logic and
metaphysics, a position in which he remained active until a
few years before his death. In this period—usually called
his critical period, because in it he wrote his great
Critiques—he published an astounding series of original
works on a wide variety of topics, in which he elaborated
and expounded his philosophy.
The Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 that he delivered on
assuming his new position already contained many of the
important elements of his mature philosophy. As indicated in
its title, De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et
Principiis: Dissertatio, the implicit dualism of the Träume
is made explicit; and it is made so on the basis of a wholly
un-Leibnizian interpretation of the distinction between
sense and understanding. Sense is not, as Leibniz had
supposed, a confused form of thinking but a source of
knowledge in its own right, although the objects so known
are still only “appearances”—the term that Leibniz also
used. They are appearances because all sensing is
conditioned by the presence, in sensibility, of the forms of
time and space, which are not objective characteristics or
frameworks of things but “pure intuitions.” But though all
knowledge of things sensible is thus of phenomena, it does
not follow that nothing is known of things as they are in
themselves. Certainly, man has no intuition, or direct
insight, into an intelligible world; but the presence in him
of certain “pure intellectual concepts, such as those of
possibility, existence, necessity, substance, cause, enables
him to have some descriptive knowledge of it. By means of
these concepts he can arrive at an exemplar that provides
him with “the common measure of all other things as far as
real.” This exemplar gives man an idea of perfection for
both the theoretical and practical orders: in the first, it
is that of the Supreme Being, God; in the latter, that of
moral perfection.
After the Dissertation, Kant published virtually nothing
for 11 years. Yet, in submitting the Dissertation to a
friend at the time of its publication, he wrote:
About a year since I attained that concept which I do not
fear ever to be obliged to alter, though I may have to widen
it, and by which all sorts of metaphysical questions can be
tested in accordance with entirely safe and easy criteria,
and a sure decision reached as to whether they are soluble
or insoluble.
Period of the three “critiques”
In 1781 the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (spelled “Critik” in
the first edition; Critique of Pure Reason) was published,
followed for the next nine years by great and original works
that in a short time brought a revolution in philosophical
thought and established the new direction in which it was to
go in the years to come.
Period of the three “critiques” » The Critique of Pure
Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason was the result of some 10 years
of thinking and meditation. Yet, even so, Kant published the
first edition only reluctantly after many postponements; for
although convinced of the truth of its doctrine, he was
uncertain and doubtful about its exposition. His misgivings
proved well-founded, and Kant complained that interpreters
and critics of the work were badly misunderstanding it. To
correct these wrong interpretations of his thought he wrote
the Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als
Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783) and brought out a
second and revised edition of the first “critique” in 1787.
Controversy still continues regarding the merits of the two
editions: readers with a preference for an Idealistic
interpretation usually prefer the first edition, whereas
those with a Realistic view adhere to the second. But with
regard to difficulty and ease of reading and understanding,
it is generally agreed that there is little to choose
between them. Anyone on first opening either book finds it
overwhelmingly difficult and impenetrably obscure.
The cause for this difficulty can be traced in part to
the works that Kant took as his models for philosophical
writing. He was the first great modern philosopher to spend
all of his time and efforts as a university professor of the
subject. Regulations required that in all lecturing a
certain set of books be used, with the result that all of
Kant’s teaching in philosophy had been based on such
handbooks as those of Wolff and Baumgarten, which abounded
in technical jargon, artificial and schematic divisions, and
great claims to completeness. Following their example, Kant
accordingly provided a highly artificial, rigid, and by no
means immediately illuminating scaffolding for all three of
his Critiques.
The Critique of Pure Reason, after an introduction, is
divided into two parts, of very different lengths: A
“Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,” running to almost 400
pages in a typical edition, followed by a “Transcendental
Doctrine of Method,” which reaches scarcely 80 pages. The “.
. . Elements” deals with the sources of human knowledge,
whereas the “. . . Method” draws up a methodology for the
use of “pure reason” and its a priori ideas. Both are
“transcendental,” in that they are presumed to analyze the
roots of all knowledge and the conditions of all possible
experience. The “Elements” is divided, in turn, into a
“Transcendental Aesthetic,” a “Transcendental Analytic,” and
a “Transcendental Dialectic.”
The simplest way of describing the contents of the
Critique is to say that it is a treatise about metaphysics:
it seeks to show the impossibility of one sort of
metaphysics and to lay the foundations for another. The
Leibnizian metaphysics, the object of his attack, is
criticized for assuming that the human mind can arrive, by
pure thought, at truths about entities, which, by their very
nature, can never be objects of experience, such as God,
human freedom, and immortality. Kant maintained, however,
that the mind has no such power and that the vaunted
metaphysics is thus a sham.
As Kant saw it, the problem of metaphysics, as indeed of
any science, is to explain how, on the one hand, its
principles can be necessary and universal (such being a
condition for any knowledge that is scientific) and yet, on
the other hand, involve also a knowledge of the real and so
provide the investigator with the possibility of more
knowledge than is analytically contained in what he already
knows; i.e., than is implicit in the meaning alone. To meet
these two conditions, Kant maintained, knowledge must rest
on judgments that are a priori, for it is only as they are
separate from the contingencies of experience that they
could be necessary and yet also synthetic; i.e., so that the
predicate term contains something more than is analytically
contained in the subject. Thus, for example, the proposition
that all bodies are extended is not synthetic but analytic
because the notion of extension is contained in the very
notion of body; whereas the proposition that all bodies are
heavy is synthetic because weight supposes, in addition to
the notion of body, that of bodies in relation to one
another. Hence, the basic problem, as Kant formulated it, is
to determine “How [i.e., under what conditions] are
synthetic a priori judgments possible?”
This problem arises, according to Kant, in three fields,
viz., in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics; and the
three main divisions of the first part of the Critique deal
respectively with these. In the “Transcendental Aesthetic,”
Kant argued that mathematics necessarily deals with space
and time and then claimed that these are both a priori forms
of human sensibility that condition whatever is apprehended
through the senses. In the “Transcendental Analytic,” the
most crucial as well as the most difficult part of the book,
he maintained that physics is a priori and synthetic because
in its ordering of experience it uses concepts of a special
sort. These concepts—“categories,” he called them—are not so
much read out of experience as read into it and, hence, are
a priori, or pure, as opposed to empirical. But they differ
from empirical concepts in something more than their origin:
their whole role in knowledge is different; for, whereas
empirical concepts serve to correlate particular experiences
and so to bring out in a detailed way how experience is
ordered, the categories have the function of prescribing the
general form that this detailed order must take. They
belong, as it were, to the very framework of knowledge. But
although they are indispensable for objective knowledge, the
sole knowledge that the categories can yield is of objects
of possible experience; they yield valid and real knowledge
only when they are ordering what is given through sense in
space and time.
In the “Transcendental Dialectic” Kant turned to
consideration of a priori synthetic judgments in
metaphysics. Here, he claimed, the situation is just the
reverse from what it was in mathematics and physics.
Metaphysics cuts itself off from sense experience in
attempting to go beyond it and, for this very reason, fails
to attain a single true a priori synthetic judgment. To
justify this claim, Kant analyzed the use that metaphysics
makes of the concept of the unconditioned. Reason, according
to Kant, seeks for the unconditioned or absolute in three
distinct spheres: (1) in philosophical psychology it seeks
for an absolute subject of knowledge; (2) in the sphere of
cosmology, it seeks for an absolute beginning of things in
time, for an absolute limit to them in space, and for an
absolute limit to their divisibility; and (3) in the sphere
of theology, it seeks for an absolute condition for all
things. In each case, Kant claimed to show that the attempt
is doomed to failure by leading to an antinomy in which
equally good reasons can be given for both the affirmative
and the negative position. The metaphysical “sciences” of
rational psychology, rational cosmology, and natural
theology, familiar to Kant from the text of Baumgarten, on
which he had to comment in his lectures, thus turn out to be
without foundation.
With this work, Kant proudly asserted that he had
accomplished a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Just as
the founder of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus, had
explained the apparent movements of the stars by ascribing
them partly to the movement of the observers, so Kant had
accounted for the application of the mind’s a priori
principles to objects by demonstrating that the objects
conform to the mind: in knowing, it is not the mind that
conforms to things but instead things that conform to the
mind.
Period of the three “critiques” » The Critique of Practical
Reason
Because of his insistence on the need for an empirical
component in knowledge and his antipathy to speculative
metaphysics, Kant is sometimes presented as a Positivist
before his time; and his attack upon metaphysics was held by
many in his own day to bring both religion and morality down
with it. Such, however, was certainly far from Kant’s
intention. Not only did he propose to put metaphysics “on
the sure path of science,” he was prepared also to say that
he “inevitably” believed in the existence of God and in a
future life. It is also true that his original conception of
his critical philosophy anticipated the preparation of a
critique of moral philosophy. The Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft (1788, spelled “Critik” and “practischen”; Critique
of Practical Reason), the result of this intention, is the
standard source book for his ethical doctrines. The earlier
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) is a shorter
and, despite its title, more readily comprehensible
treatment of the same general topic. Both differ from Die
Metaphysik der Sitten (1797) in that they deal with pure
ethics and try to elucidate basic principles; whereas the
later work is concerned with applying what they establish in
the concrete, a process that involved the consideration of
virtues and vices and the foundations of law and politics.
There are many points of similarity between Kant’s ethics
and his epistemology, or theory of knowledge. He used the
same scaffolding for both—a “Doctrine of Elements,”
including an “Analytic” and a “Dialectic,” followed by a
“Methodology”; but the second Critique is far shorter and
much less complicated. Just as the distinction between sense
and intelligence was fundamental for the former, so is that
between the inclinations and moral reason for the latter.
And just as the nature of the human cognitive situation was
elucidated in the first Critique by reference to the
hypothetical notion of an intuitive understanding, so is
that of the human moral situation clarified by reference to
the notion of a “holy will.” For a will of this kind there
would be no distinction between reason and inclination; a
being possessed of a holy will would always act as it ought.
It would not, however, have the concepts of duty and moral
obligation, which enter only when reason and desire find
themselves opposed. In the case of human beings, the
opposition is continuous, for man is at the same time both
flesh and spirit; it is here that the influence of Kant’s
religious background is most prominent. Hence, the moral
life is a continuing struggle in which morality appears to
the potential delinquent in the form of a law that demands
to be obeyed for its own sake—a law, however, the commands
of which are not issued by some alien authority but
represent the voice of reason, which the moral subject can
recognize as his own.
In the “Dialectic,” Kant took up again the ideas of God,
freedom, and immortality. Dismissed in the first Critique as
objects that men can never know because they transcend human
sense experience, he now argued that they are essential
postulates for the moral life. Though not reachable in
metaphysics, they are absolutely essential for moral
philosophy.
Kant is often described as an ethical Rationalist, and
the description is not wholly inappropriate. He never
espoused, however, the radical Rationalism of some of his
contemporaries nor of more recent philosophers for whom
reason is held to have direct insight into a world of values
or the power to intuit the rightness of this or that moral
principle. Thus, practical, like theoretical, reason was for
him formal rather than material—a framework of formative
principles rather than a content of actual rules. This is
why he put such stress on his first formulation of the
categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim through
which you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.” Lacking any insight into the moral realm,
men can only ask themselves whether what they are proposing
to do has the formal character of law—the character, namely,
of being the same for all persons similarly circumstanced.
Period of the three “critiques” » The Critique of Judgment
The Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790: spelled “Critik”)—one of
the most original and instructive of all of Kant’s
writings—was not foreseen in his original conception of the
critical philosophy. Thus it is perhaps best regarded as a
series of appendixes to the other two Critiques. The work
falls into two main parts, called respectively “Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment” and “Critique of Teleological Judgment.”
In the first of these, after an introduction in which he
discussed “logical purposiveness,” he analyzed the notion of
“aesthetic purposiveness” in judgments that ascribe beauty
to something. Such a judgment, according to him, unlike a
mere expression of taste, lays claim to general validity;
yet it cannot be said to be cognitive because it rests on
feeling, not on argument. The explanation lies in the fact
that, when a person contemplates an object and finds it
beautiful, there is a certain harmony between his
imagination and his understanding, of which he is aware from
the immediate delight that he takes in the object.
Imagination grasps the object and yet is not restricted to
any definite concept; whereas a person imputes the delight
that he feels to others because it springs from the free
play of his cognitive faculties, which are the same in all
men.
In the second part, Kant turned to consider teleology in
nature as it is posed by the existence in organic bodies of
things of which the parts are reciprocally means and ends to
each other. In dealing with these bodies, one cannot be
content with merely mechanical principles. Yet if mechanism
is abandoned and the notion of a purpose or end of nature is
taken literally, this seems to imply that the things to
which it applies must be the work of some supernatural
designer; but this would mean a passing from the sensible to
the suprasensible, a step proved in the first Critique to be
impossible. Kant answered this objection by admitting that
teleological language cannot be avoided in taking account of
natural phenomena; but it must be understood as meaning only
that organisms must be thought of “as if” they were the
product of design, and that is by no means the same as
saying that they are deliberately produced.
Last years
The critical philosophy was soon being taught in every
important German-speaking university, and young men flocked
to Königsberg as a shrine of philosophy. In some cases, the
Prussian government even undertook the expense of their
support. Kant came to be consulted as an oracle on all kinds
of questions, including such subjects as the lawfulness of
vaccination. Such homage did not interrupt Kant’s regular
habits. Scarcely five feet tall, with a deformed chest, and
suffering from weak health, he maintained throughout his
life a severe regimen. It was arranged with such regularity
that people set their clocks according to his daily walk
along the street named for him, “The Philosopher’s Walk.”
Until old age prevented him, he is said to have missed this
regular appearance only on the occasion when Rousseau’s
Émile so engrossed him that for several days he stayed at
home.
With the publication of the third Critique, Kant’s main
philosophical work was done. From 1790 his health began to
decline seriously. He still had many literary projects but
found it impossible to write more than a few hours a day.
The writings that he then completed consist partly of an
elaboration of subjects not previously treated in any
detail, partly of replies to criticisms and to the
clarification of misunderstandings. With the publication in
1793 of his work Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
blossen Vernunft, Kant became involved in a dispute with
Prussian authorities on the right to express religious
opinions. The book was found to be altogether too
Rationalistic for orthordox taste; he was charged with
misusing his philosophy to the “distortion and depreciation
of many leading and fundamental doctrines of sacred
Scripture and Christianity” and was required by the
government not to lecture or write anything further on
religious subjects. Kant agreed but privately interpreted
the ban as a personal promise to the King, from which he
felt himself to be released on the latter’s death in 1797.
At any rate, he returned to the forbidden subject in his
last major essay, Der Streit der Fakultäten (1798; “The
Conflict of the Faculties”).
The large work at which he laboured until his death—the
fragments of which fill the two final volumes of the great
Berlin edition of his works—was evidently intended to be a
major contribution to his critical philosophy. What remains,
however, is not so much an unfinished work as a series of
notes for a work that was never written. Its original title
was Übergang von den metaphysische Anfangsgründe der
Naturwissenschaft zur Physik (“Transition from the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics”),
and it may have been his intention to carry further the
argument advanced in the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der
Naturwissenschaft (1786) by showing that it is possible to
construct a priori not merely the general outline of a
science of nature but a good many of its details as well.
But judging from the extant fragments, however numerous they
are, it remains conjectural whether its completion would
have constituted a major addition to his philosophy and its
reputation.
After a gradual decline that was painful to his friends
as well as to himself, Kant died in Königsberg, February 12,
1804. His last words were “Es ist gut” (“It is good”). His
tomb in the cathedral was inscribed with the words (in
German) “The starry heavens above me and the moral law
within me,” the two things that he declared in the
conclusion of the second Critique “fill the mind with ever
new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the
more steadily we reflect on.”
Otto Allen Bird
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Friedrich Schleiermacher
born Nov. 21, 1768, Breslau, Silesia
died Feb. 12, 1834, Berlin
German theologian, preacher, and classical philologist,
generally recognized as the founder of modern Protestant
theology. His major work, Der christliche Glaube (1821–22;
2nd ed. 1831; The Christian Faith), is a systematic
interpretation of Christian dogmatics.
Childhood and education
Schleiermacher was the son of Gottlieb and Katharina-Maria
(née Stubenrauch) Schleiermacher. His father, a Reformed
(Calvinist) military chaplain, and his mother both came from
families of clergymen. He had an older sister, Charlotte,
and a younger brother, Carl.
From 1783 to 1785 he attended a school of the Moravian
Brethren (Herrnhuters), an influential Pietistic group, at
Niesky. In this milieu, individualized study was combined
with a piety based on the joy of salvation and a vividly
imaginative relation with Jesus as Saviour, rather than (as
in the Pietism centred in Halle) on a struggle to feel
sorrow and repentance. Here Schleiermacher developed his
lifelong interest in the Greek and Latin classics and his
distinctive sense of the religious life. Later he called
himself a Herrnhuter “of a higher order.”
Yet the lifeless and dogmatic narrowness of the Moravian
seminary at Barby, which he attended from 1785 to 1787,
conflicted with his increasingly critical and inquiring
spirit. He left in 1787 with the reluctant permission of his
father, who had at first harshly rebuked him for his
worldliness and accused him of hypocrisy, and at Easter he
matriculated at the University of Halle. There he lived with
his maternal uncle, Samuel Stubenrauch, a professor of
theology, who could understand his restlessness and
skepticism.
A diligent and independent student, Schleiermacher began,
along with his theological studies, an intensive study of
Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. In his epistemology (theory of
knowledge), though not in his ethics and religion, he
remained a Kantian throughout his life. After two years he
moved to Drossen (Ośno), near Frankfurt an der Oder, where
his uncle had assumed a pastorate, and began preparing for
his first theological examinations. Though he read more in
ethics than in theology, he took his examinations in
Reformed theology in 1790, achieving marks of “very good” or
“excellent” in all fields except dogmatics, the one in which
he was later to make his most original contribution.
Early career
Schleiermacher then took a position as tutor for the family
of the Graf (Count) zu Dohna in Schlobitten, East Prussia.
Besides tutoring, he preached regularly, chiefly on ethical
themes, and continued his philosophical study, particularly
of the question of human freedom. After taking his second
theological examinations in 1794, the same year in which his
father died, Schleiermacher became assistant pastor in
Landsberg and then, in 1796, pastor of the Charité, a
hospital and home for the aged just outside Berlin. In that
city he found his way into the circle of the German Romantic
writers through the creator of early Romanticism, Friedrich
von Schlegel, with whom he shared an apartment for a time,
began a translation of Plato’s works, and became acquainted
with the new Berlin society.
In Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren
Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured
Despisers), written in 1799 as a kind of literary
confession, Schleiermacher addressed the Romantics with the
message that they were not as far from religion as they
thought; for religion is the “feeling and intuition of the
universe” or “the sense of the Infinite in the finite,” and
Christianity is one individual shaping of that feeling. This
work, perennially attractive for its view of a living union
of religion and culture, greatly impressed the young
theologians of the time. The Monologen (1800; Soliloquies),
written in a somewhat artificial rhythmic prose, presented a
parallel to religion in the view of ethics as the intuition
and action of the self in its individuality. The
individuality of each human being is here seen as a unique
“organ and symbol” of the Infinite itself.
A six-year courtship of Eleonore Grunow, unhappily
married to a pastor in Berlin, ended in 1802, when
Schleiermacher accepted a call to a small Reformed
congregation in Stolp, Pomerania (now Słupsk, Pol.), and she
decided to remain with her husband, but until 1805 he
continued to hope she might still consent to become his
wife. In this pastorate he became aware of the deep cleavage
between a church preacher and a modern man, but at the same
time he came to acquire a great fondness for preaching.
Halle and Berlin
In 1804 he accepted a call to be a university preacher,
becoming a member of the faculty of theology at the
University of Halle. As the first Reformed theologian on
that Lutheran theological faculty and as a spokesman for
Romantic Idealism, he met a cool reception. But the
situation changed, and after a year he was made ordinary
professor of theology.
In Die Weihnachtsfeier (1805; Christmas Celebration),
written in the style of a Platonic dialogue, Schleiermacher
adopted the definition of religion he later incorporated
into Der christliche Glaube. Instead of speaking of religion
as “feeling and intuition,” he now called it simply
“feeling”—namely, the immediate feeling that God lives and
works in us as finite human beings.
Napoleon’s invasion of Prussia forced Schleiermacher to
leave Halle in 1807. He moved to Berlin, giving lectures on
his own and travelling about to encourage national
resistance; he also assisted Wilhelm von Humboldt in laying
plans for the new university to be founded in Berlin. He
married Henriette von Willich, the widow of a close friend
of his, in 1809. In that same year he became pastor of
Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Trinity Church) in Berlin and, in
1810, professor of theology at the new university; this
latter position he retained to the end of his life.
His activities in the years following were many and
varied. He lectured on theology and philosophy; he preached
in Dreifaltigkeitskirche almost every Sunday until the end
of his life; he was a member (from 1800) and permanent
secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences; he carried on
an extensive correspondence; and he was active in promoting
the Prussian Union, which brought Lutheran and Calvinist
churches into one body. His major publications during this
period were the Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums
(1811; Brief Outline of the Study of Theology), presenting a
curriculum in which the function of theology is to shape and
direct the church as a religious community, and Der
christliche Glaube.
His relations with the Prussian king were tense until
1831, partly because of differences of view concerning the
Prussian constitution and the relation between church and
state, and partly because of machinations of his personal
rivals. At one stage, an edict of banishment was issued
against him, but it was not carried out.
He preached his last sermon on February 2 and gave his
last lecture on Feb. 6, 1834. He died a few days later from
inflammation of the lungs. His death stirred the populace of
the whole city; Leopold von Ranke, a renowned historian,
estimated that there were from 20,000 to 30,000 people in
the long funeral procession through the streets of Berlin.
He was buried in the cemetery of Dreifaltigkeitskirche.
Influence
Schleiermacher’s thought continued to influence theology
throughout the 19th century and the early part of the 20th.
Between about 1925 and 1955 it was under severe attack by
followers of neoorthodox theology (founded by Karl Barth and
Emil Brunner) as leading away from the gospel toward a
religion based on human culture. Since then, however, there
has been a renewed study and appreciation of
Schleiermacher’s contributions, partly because the critique
was one-sided, and partly because of a new interest in
19th-century theology.
Robert P. Scharlemann
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Johann Friedrich Herbart
born May 4, 1776, Oldenburg
died Aug. 14, 1841, Göttingen, Hanover
German philosopher and educator, who led the renewed
19th-century interest in Realism and is considered among the
founders of modern scientific pedagogy.
After studying under Johann Gottlieb Fichte at Jena (1794),
Herbart worked as a tutor at Interlaken, Switz., from 1797 to
1800, during which period he made the acquaintance of
Pestalozzi. Becoming a licentiate of the University of Göttingen
in 1802, he was appointed extraordinary professor there in 1805.
At the close of 1808 he became Kant’s successor as professor at
Königsberg. There he also conducted a seminary of pedagogy until
1833, when he returned as professor of philosophy to Göttingen,
where he remained until his death.
Herbart’s position in the history of philosophy is due mainly
to his contributions to the philosophy of mind. His aims in this
respect are expressed by the title of his textbook—Psychologie
als Wissenschaft neu gegrundet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik, und
Mathematik, 2 vol. (1824–25; “Psychology As Knowledge Newly
Founded on Experience, Metaphysics, and Mathematics”); of
central importance is the inclusion of Mathematik. He rejected
the whole concept of faculties (in Kantian terms) and regarded
mental life as the manifestation of elementary sensory units or
“presentations” (Vorstellungen). These he conceived as mental
forces rather than as mere “ideas” in Locke’s sense. The study
of their interactions gave rise to a statics and dynamics of the
mind, to be expressed in mathematical formulas like those of
Newtonian mechanics. Ideas need not be conscious; and they might
either combine to produce composite resultants or conflict with
one another so that some get temporarily inhibited or repressed
“below the threshold of consciousness.” An organized but
unconscious system of associated ideas formed an “apperception
mass”; such a system could apperceive a new presentation and
thus give it richer meaning. On this basis Herbart developed a
theory of education as a branch of applied psychology.
His theory of education—known as Herbartianism—was set out
principally in two works, Pestalozzis Idee eines A B C der
Anschauung (1802; “Pestalozzi’s Idea of an A B C of Sense
Perception”) and Allgemeine Pädagogik (1806; “Universal
Pedagogy”), which advocated five formal steps in teaching: (1)
preparation, a process of relating new material to be learned to
relevant past ideas or memories in order to give the pupil a
vital interest in the topic under consideration; (2)
presentation, presenting new material by means of concrete
objects or actual experience; (3) association, thorough
assimilation of the new idea through comparison with former
ideas and consideration of their similarities and differences in
order to implant the new idea in the mind; (4) generalization, a
procedure especially important to the instruction of adolescents
and designed to develop the mind beyond the level of perception
and the concrete; and (5) application, using acquired knowledge
not in a purely utilitarian way, but so that every learned idea
becomes a part of the functional mind and an aid to a clear,
vital interpretation of life. This step is presumed possible
only if the student immediately applies the new idea, making it
his own.
Herbart maintained that a science of education was possible,
and he furthered the idea that education should be a subject for
university study. His ideas took firm hold in Germany in the
1860s and spread also to the United States. By the turn of the
century, however, the five steps had degenerated to a mechanical
formalism, and the ideas behind them were replaced by new
pedagogical theories, in particular those of John Dewey.
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