Chapter 2: The laying of the foundations (to 1781)
(i) Towns and princes (to 1720)
From the middle of the 13th century, the social and political tensions were becoming apparent that were to determine the culture of modern Germany. A decline in the authority of the Holy Roman Emperors coincided with a European population explosion and an economic boom. Although plague and a worsening climate halted the continental expansion in the later 14th century, Germany by then had several major urban centres, notably Cologne, Augsburg, and later Nuremberg, with around 50,000 inhabitants, which were comparable to contemporary London. The modern commercial and banking system, born in Italy around 1200, of which the German cities were soon a part, brought with it new political and cultural attitudes. The cities which, in a long struggle with Germany’s lesser rulers, the Emperors had freed from princely overlordship were, like the Italian city-states, oligarchic rather than democratic in any modern sense, but they were self-governing, through elective councils, and once the guilds, representing industry, had won a place alongside the merchants and bankers, political and economic life were closely integrated. Military and feudal values, such as obedience and honour, were overshadowed by values derived from the economic process, such as productivity and enjoyment, and by an interest in the spiritual signifi cance of the material world. Above all, the monetarization of economic relations, the replacement of feudal dues and payments in kind by rents paid in cash, a process which in urban areas was largely complete by the end of the 13th century, had a fundamental effect on conceptions of personal identity. With the breaking of the physically tangible link between producing and consuming, individuals, particularly those not involved in the economic process of work, and particularly those not allowed a signifi cant political identity either, were freed to think of themselves as primarily centres of - at least, potential - consumption and enjoyment, an attitude which can be called ‘bourgeois’, in the strict sense. Women, therefore, particularly those from monied families and those living in religious communities, were the fi rst to give literary expression to this new sense of the self. Mystical writers from Mechthild von Magdeburg (c. 1210-83) to the great Dominican theologian and spiritual director of women religious, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327), found new linguistic and literary resources to describe the infi nite, eternal, and unearned pleasure of the life of the soul with God: Eckhart coined some of the most important abstract words in the German language, including ‘Bildung’. As literacy spread, the new concept of individual identity, reinforced by the practice of solitary and silent reading, rapidly made obsolete the chivalrous literature of feudalism, and after the rise of mysticism its themes survived only as the material of burlesque, of self-conscious revivalism, or of transformation into spiritual allegory. Outside the devotional realm much of the literature of the closely knit urban communities was collective or anonymous in origin: love songs, drinking songs, and ballads, later lumped together as ‘folk songs’, some of them still known today; liturgical and biblical dramas; the strictly regulated work of the literary guilds of artisans known as ‘Mastersingers’, most famous among them Hans Sachs (1494-1576). Narrative, whether in verse or prose, was often coarse, humorous, or obscene, and satirical in purpose. The collection of the exploits of the rogue Till Eulenspiegel (‘Owleglasse’) and the Low German animal epic
Reynard the Fox achieved European currency. New trends in the visual arts fl owed in from the urban centres of Italy and the Low Countries and converged in the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460-1531), and in Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the two artists of world stature produced by 15th-century Germany.
The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff, 1494) of Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), illustrated by Dürer, was the fi rst German bestseller of the age of print. Johann Gutenberg’s printing-press set up in Mainz around 1445 was the most infl uential contribution to world-culture made by the medieval German town, but in less than a century it was followed by another, almost equally important.
Both the main cultural tendencies of medieval German urban life, the mystical tendency and the realistic, came to a focus in Martin Luther (1483-1546), the son of a miner, who fi rst trained as a lawyer and then became an Augustinian friar and professor of theology at the new university of Wittenberg.
Luther’s teaching that God gave His heavenly rewards as a free gift in response to faith alone took to an extreme the mystics’ dissociation of personal identity from the world of work. His Ninety-Five Theses (1517) against the papal practice of selling ‘indulgences’ - remission of the temporal punishment due to sin - were a passionate defence of the improbable belief (still prevalent today) that the soul is independent of the economic process. At the same time, like his near-contemporary Rabelais, Luther unashamedly spoke out for the material appetites that the towns had grown up to satisfy. His robust rejection of the poverty, chastity, and obedience to clerical authority to which he had originally vowed himself was expressed in the blunt, earthy, and satirical style of popular literature. He lived with equal intensity in the two worlds that monetarization had forced apart, and that the Catholic Church was struggling inadequately to hold together, and his revival of Augustine’s distinction between the earthly and the heavenly cities was the true source of the modern dualism of matter and mind that is usually attributed to Descartes.
His forceful yet divided personality marked all that he wrote, his pamphlets, sermons, catechisms, a handful of enormously infl uential hymns, and his translation of the Bible (1522-34),
which made him into one of the founders of the modern German language.
But there had been reformers before Luther and if he had relied on the protection only of the towns whose culture he embodied Luther would have been burned at the stake like Jan Hus. Luther survived his condemnation by the Pope, and then by the Empire at the Reichstag held in Worms in 1521, because his cause was adopted by some of the German princes. For a prince of the Empire there were positive inducements to stand behind Luther as he faced down the authority of the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V: not just Luther’s transfer of ultimate jurisdiction in religious matters from Rome to the local ruler (originally intended only as a temporary provision), nor even the consequential transfer of Church property to the state, but a more subtle and more signifi cant advantage in the princes’ continuing battle with the towns. For if the princes could cast themselves as the guardians of the modern urban and commercial sense of individual identity, expressed in the new Lutheran piety, the towns could be weaned away from their dependence on the Empire, which had originally given them their rights, and they would eventually fi nd their home with their local overlords.
Supporting these powerful forces was a dangerous game. Unlike Lutherans, Calvinists and Anabaptists believed in a right of resistance to sinful civil authority, and a bloody struggle between the various political and religious interests continued until the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Luther had refused to compromise at Worms, but at Augsburg Lutheranism was more accommodating.
The settlement was the basis of Germany’s constitution for the next 250 years: the Empire was further weakened by the admission of a variety of confessions; the power of the princes was further enhanced by the right to determine the religion of their domains; and the freedom of the new Christian individuals was pared down to a right to emigrate to a territory of their own denomination.
The full historical drama of the Reformation, of its breach with the past in the interests of the individual soul and its satisfactions, was given symbolic, even mythical, form in an anonymous work of genius written for the new market created by the new technology of printing, the History of Dr John Faust (Historia von D. Johann Fausten) published in Frankfurt in 1587. There was a real Dr Faust, a rather unsuccessful astrologer and alchemist who came to an obscurely unnatural end around 1540, and the originality of the Frankfurt ‘Volksbuch’ (chap-book), as it is usually called, lies primarily in its presenting itself as a piece of news - a ‘novel’ in the etymological sense - a story of and for its own time, not a retelling of a traditional tale nor even a traditional collection of comic episodes, though that is its superfi cial structure. Its hero, or villain, takes to a radical extreme the 16th century’s rejection of tradition by abandoning established learning for magic and selling his soul to the enemy of religion in exchange for 24 years of pleasure, culminating in the resurrection of Helen of Troy to be his mistress. (By a quirk of literary fate, travelling English actors soon brought to Germany a dramatic version of the life of Dr Faust which Christopher Marlowe had prepared on the basis of the original chap-book, or its English translation, and which, in popularized and decreasingly recognizable adaptations for amateur productions or puppet plays, diffused the story through the whole of the non-literate German-speaking world.)
A deep anxiety about the possible ultimate implications of the individualism on which Luther’s revolt was based underlies both the transgressive thrill of the narration of Faust’s excesses and the moralizing retreat at the end, after the devil has claimed his own, into the collective security of orthodox (Lutheran) church life. Just as Lutheranism compromised politically, accepting subordination to state authority in order to survive as a vehicle for personal salvation, so it compromised spiritually, imposing on itself a hierarchy and formulaic dogmatism as strict as Rome’s, for fear of its own revolutionary, perhaps even self-destructive, potential. The towns in which the Reformation had been born had lost interest in innovation, whether in business or in religion.
Instead, Lutheranism acquired a parallel history of mystics, eccentrics, and ultimately Pietists, who developed its original inspiration outside its established institutions. Many of them drew on the works of Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a self-educated shoemaker from Görlitz, who sought to unify theology and natural philosophy by postulating triadic relations between positive and negative principles described in language as creative and neologistic as Meister Eckhart’s, and partly derived from alchemy.
Under the name of ‘Behmen’ he became known and infl uential in England, where his readers eventually included Newton and Blake.
After the great catastrophe of the Thirty Years War princely power was fi nally consolidated as the distinguishing feature of German political and cultural development in the modern era.
The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 was little more than a secular extension of the Peace of Augsburg of a century before: the hour of absolutism and its culture had come. In Germany even Lutheran or Reformed monarchs had a clear interest in suppressing the independent spirit of Protestant towns. In the literary response to these profound changes an important role was played by Silesia (now southern Poland) where, after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the victorious Hapsburgs, acting in their own domains as princes rather than emperors, reasserted central authority and pursued a vigorous policy of recatholicization. The predominantly Protestant German-speaking bourgeois of Silesia found themselves therefore on the fault-line between the opposing forces of the age, both in religion and in politics, between Catholic and Protestant, between the urban past and the absolutist future, and they fi rst pointed out the path that German literature was to follow for the next three centuries. Martin Opitz (1597-1639), a man of few personal beliefs, toyed in public with the possibility of conversion to Catholicism, and, born the son of a master-butcher, became a distinguished diplomat in the service of various princes to whom he dedicated his books. He is usually regarded as the
reformer who made modern German literature possible, on the strength of his Book of German Poesy (Buch von der deutschen Poeterey, 1624) which determined that German versifi cation is based on stress, not the number or length of syllables, established the French alexandrine as the standard German metre, and laid down rules for rhymes and such forms as the ode and the sonnet.
But his real achievement was to reconcile literature to the new political realities, ‘for it is the greatest reward that poets can expect,’ he wrote, ‘that they fi nd a place in the rooms of kings and princes’ and his programme of regularization gave German verse a new prestige as a courtly art. His disciples included another Silesian, Andreas Gryphius (1616-64), author of tragedies and of some of the fi nest German sonnets. In both genres Gryphius embodied the Lutheran confl ict of loyalties in a tension between powerful passions and the constraints of Opitzian form - as if the towns that had given Germany both material wealth and the Lutheran conscience were protesting at their slow and violent subjection to princely authority.
The greatest German writer of the 17th century, however, had no time for anyone’s rules. Johann (‘Hans’) Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621 or 1622-76) came not from Silesia but from Gelnhausen near Frankfurt. When he was 12, his Protestant home town was sacked and burned and he became a soldier.
After changing allegiance and religion, and fi nishing the war as secretary of an Imperial regiment, he eventually settled down as a land-agent for the Bishop of Strasbourg in a village in the Black Forest and adopted, with rather tenuous justifi cation, a title of nobility. In his picaresque and partly autobiographical novel, Adventures of the German Simplicissimus (Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, 1668 and 1671), we hear for the last time for many years the voice of a free and venturesome middle class, confi dent that it knows the facts of life as well as anyone, that though our ultimate destiny may not be in our own hands, it is not in anyone else’s, and that it is up to us to make of it what we can. Scenes of war, grisly and comic, of urban, rural, and commercial life, of sexual intrigue in high and low places, of sheer supernatural fantasy, and one of Europe’s fi rst tales of shipwreck on a desert island, are combined, through the retrospective narration of the principal fi gure, now a hermit, into a complex moral fable of rise, fall, and redemption. Simplicissimus sold as no book of quality did in Germany for another hundred years and Grimmelshausen followed it up with a number of parallel stories from the same milieu. Notable among them are the memoirs of the female vagabond and camp-follower Courasche (‘courage’ - the name she gives to the pudenda by which she makes a living), whose childlessness only increases her sexual appetite and whose tales of warring and whoring, brutality and deceit, are uncompromised by any of Simplicissimus’ moral and religious reflections. Her story stops, but does not end:
Grimmelshausen was a realist and knew that a world without redemption does not admit of conclusions.
In the literature of the post-war period realism was in short supply. Outside the courts and the schools secular literature was a minority interest - in 1650 it made up only around 5% of all books published in Germany, while popular theology accounted for four times as many titles. Printed literature, volume produced for a market, the one form of cultural expression that is by its origins bourgeois and by its nature commercial, was fi rmly in the hands of state institutions, the church and the university. Though these fi gures changed hardly at all over the next 90 years, a movement in the atmosphere is detectable around 1680. In 1681, for the fi rst time more books were published in German than in Latin, and in the 1670s, with the foundation of the fi rst Pietist educational and charitable institutions in Frankfurt and Halle, Lutheranism began a revivalist mission to the world outside the ranks of the clergy and the universities. The original Lutheran focus on the inner life was rediscovered and a resource that had once been exclusive to mystics was redirected into more generally accessible channels. The middle classes were beginning to identify their souls as a place of freedom and were accepting their subordinate, but effective, role in a greater scheme of things. The new attitude was perfectly and profoundly expressed in the philosophy of Germany’s outstanding intellectual genius of the time, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), for whom the universe is a completely rational system, though its rationality is manifest only to those positioned on its higher levels, such as monarchs, and ultimately only to God. But every one of the units out of which the system is constructed is a soul completely secure in its own identity (a ‘monad’), invulnerable to external events, and with a perspective on the whole which, though limited, is perfect in its own way and so a unique expression of the Divine wisdom. ‘Know your place’ is Leibniz’ metaphysics and ethics in a nutshell, and they accorded well with the position of most German writers and thinkers in the age of absolutism.
(ii) Between France and England (1720-81)
Everyone knows that the 18th century was the century of Enlightenment. But there were (at least) two Enlightenments for by 1700 there were two distinct constituencies with an interest in criticizing what remained of Europe’s feudal institutions. On the one hand, there was the bourgeois Enlightenment, characteristic of England and Scotland, but with some support in France, which criticized the established property owners, fi rst the Church and then the nobility, in the interests of the free movement of capital, and in the name of the free individual. In philosophy the bourgeois Enlightenment - represented, for example, by Locke, Mandeville, and Newton - tended to empiricism, to giving the evidence of the senses priority over the speculations of reason, and ultimately to materialism. But, on the other hand, there was also what can be called an official, bureaucratic, or monarchical, Enlightenment which criticized the relics of feudalism, whether the Church and the nobility or the guilds and the Imperial Free Cities, in the name of collective order and in the interests of a single, central administrative will. The bureaucratic Enlightenment - represented, for example, by Descartes, Leibniz, and Leibniz’ infl uential disciple Christian August Wolff (1679-1754) - was usually associated with philosophical rationalism - with a tendency to give rational principles priority over the unreliable evidence of the individual’s senses - and with the cultural authority of France, since France had become Europe’s most powerful centralized monarchy. The rationalist Enlightenment of state officials was particularly strong in 18th-century Germany as local monarchs sought to tighten their grip, consolidating their territories and unifying their administration. A single transparent system was to rule in society as in thought, and the pupils of Wolff, whose system provided a rational argument from fi rst principles for anything from the existence of God to the importance of coffee-shops, had a virtual monopoly on university appointments in philosophy throughout the middle years of the century. French, the international language of Enlightened monarchs, was the language of the German courts: the nobility conversed and corresponded in French, read French books, and at the court theatres often enough watched French plays. By contrast, until the mid-18th century, English had no international standing and the empiricist Enlightenment of the Anglo-Scottish bourgeoisie had few followers in German philosophy, its infl uence being felt more in the natural sciences and later in the study of history (particularly at the new university of Göttingen, founded in 1737 by the English King, George II, for the benefi t of his German subjects in the Electorate of Hanover).
English literary infl uence was at its strongest in the northern ports of Hamburg and Bremen, which led an independent existence in semi-detachment from the rest of the Empire. The true bourgeois culture that maintained itself here produced the fi rst German translation of Robinson Crusoe, in 1720, and the fi rst German imitations of the supreme vehicles of middle-class enlightenment in England, the ‘moral weeklies’, such as Addison’s Spectator.
A cheerful sensualism, confi dent of the value of the material world, prevailed in the local literature, in the often humorous love poetry of the merchant Friedrich von Hagedorn (1708-54) or the voluminous meditations on fl owers, insects, and other natural phenomena of the city-father Barthold Hinrich Brockes (1680-1747). But it was diffi cult to integrate this essentially exotic empiricism with the systematic rationalism that was emerging as the intellectual orthodoxy of princely Germany. An unwittingly, if disarmingly, comic element enters Brockes’ verse when his conscientiously minute empirical observations ride up against the Wolffi anism that assures him everything has a purpose in the Divine plan, and he concludes, for example, that the ultimate perfection of the chamois is that its horns can be made into handles for walking-sticks. The future of German literature had to lie in somewhere less marginal than Hamburg, somewhere where the challenge of the Enlightened absolutist state would be more directly felt and met - somewhere such as Leipzig. Leipzig was the largest city in Electoral Saxony and the home of a trade fair which, together with its counterpart in Frankfurt, had been a pillar of the German publishing industry since the 16th century, but it was neither a Free City nor a centre of government. (The Elector and his court resided at Dresden, 70 miles away.) The majority of its citizens were as bourgeois as Hamburg’s but they did not manage their own affairs. Leipzig, however, differed from the Imperial Free Cities in a further crucial respect: it had a university. Some of the most active members of Germany’s subject middle class here lived alongside the most distinctive cultural institution of Protestant absolutism. In the second quarter of the 18th century, Leipzig was the centre of a powerful campaign to make literature in German the preferred means of cultural self-expression for a middle class, whether commercial or official, united in its acceptance of subordination to princely authority. The campaign was consciously modelled on that of Opitz, but it was in the hands, not of a diplomat and intimate of rulers, seeking a hearing for poetry in the chambers of the great, but of a professor of poetry (unpaid) and logic (paid). Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-66) was the author of a two-volume compendium of the Leibniz-Wolffi an philosophy and, in the spirit of that philosophy, he tried to show, in his Essay towards a Critical Art of Poetry for the Germans (Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen, 1730), how literature could and should be based on a few simple, rational principles, systematically applied, so that the same works could be enjoyed by the bourgeoisie and by university-educated civil servants. He concentrated therefore, not on the novel, the new genre developed during his lifetime by Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson for mass circulation among the English middle classes, and translated for the German market in suspiciously Anglophile Hamburg and Göttingen, but on the drama. Unlike the novel, the drama had a good classical and academic pedigree, and a central role in the culture of the courts, yet it still provided a measure of general entertainment. Gottsched opened up the drama as a channel of cultural communication between rulers and ruled in absolutist Germany. He insisted on the use of the German language, established personal links with such touring theatre companies as survived, and in collaboration with his wife wrote, collected, and translated model plays for them. But he also demanded that plays be rationally constructed and observe the unities and proprieties of the French drama of the age of Louis XIV, so making a play in German a conceivable alternative, in a court theatre, to a tragedy by Racine or an opera in Italian. Gottsched created a powerful idea, which continued to dominate the discussion long after his own applications of it had become ridiculous. But the novel, or rather, the developing book market which fed the demand for the novel, could not be ignored, and Gottsched did more by publishing plays, and collections of plays, as books to be read than by all his prescriptions for theatrical writing and performance.
German literature of the 18th century emerged not from the imitation of works of the English empiricist Enlightenment nor from Gottsched’s Leibniz-Wolffi an and France-oriented rationalism but from the confl ict of the two, a confl ict which mirrored the diverging interests of the official and the bourgeois wings of the German middle class, and which intensifi ed as the century wore on. The direct opposition to Gottsched was concentrated in two areas of self-governing republicanism, Bremen in the north and Switzerland in the south, where the poetry of the anti-monarchist Milton, rich in depictions of the supernatural, was hailed as the counter-example to rationalism.
The creative compromise between Gottsched and Milton was found, however, by a brilliant theology student in Leipzig, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803). In 1748 Klopstock published the fi rst three cantos of The Messiah (Der Messias), a would-be Miltonic epic on the theme that had defeated Milton, the redemptive action of Christ, and written in hexameters, the metre of Homer and Virgil, previously little used in German.
Klopstock went on to adapt Greek and Latin strophic forms in his ‘odes’, and these shorter poems on love, friendship, nature, and moral and patriotic themes - and the pleasures of ice-skating, for which he had a passion - show, better than his epic, the truly revolutionary feature of his writing: a new conception of the seriousness and autonomy of literature. He was committed to the commercial medium of the printed and published word, not to Gottsched’s semi-courtly medium of the theatre, but he was claiming for what he wrote an authority equal to that of the state institutions of the university (which provided the scholarly basis for his formal innovations) and of the Church (which gave him the subject matter of The Messiah and the theological language of his other poems). In Klopstock’s odes, however, the purpose of the frequent invocations of God and immortality is not to explore a religious mystery, but to underline the unique signifi cance that attaches to his experience and his feelings simply because they are his, and because - as the strange and monumental form tells us - he is a poet. The anxious, slightly puzzled, naturalist who recounted his quest for order in Brockes’ poems was replaced by a consciousness that knew itself to be the source of the meaning it found in a landscape, a thunderstorm, a summer’s night. The shape of things to come became apparent when, on the publication of the fi rst cantos of The Messiah, a patron emerged who was willing to underwrite this claim to exceptionality. The king of Denmark granted Klopstock a pension so that the epic could be completed and he gave up his theological studies to become Germany’s fi rst full-time poet.
If poetry became the religion of Klopstock, Greek art became the religion of another ex-theologian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), who escaped altogether from the Germany that offered him only the drudgery of schoolmastering and tutoring to devote himself to the study of ancient art in Rome. In Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture (Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 1755), he argued that the physical and moral beauty that we fi nd in the art of the ancient Greeks derives from the merits of their society and religion; by imitating their art we can hope to recover those ancient perfections. The ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’, as his famous phrase has it, of their best works can suffuse our art, and lives, and - the implication seems to follow - our society and religion too. His ecstatic descriptions of particular works, above all the Belvederean Apollo, use the language of Pietist enthusiasm to suggest that through his own feelings and words the spirit of the ancient deities has re-awoken to become active in the modern world. As yet poetry and the visual arts were not understood as branches of the same human activity - what we now call ‘Art’ - but once they had both begun to be seen as alternative secular channels of divine revelation a fi rst step had been taken towards a general aesthetic theory. (The term ‘aesthetics’ itself entered academic currency in 1750 as an invention of the Prussian disciple of Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten [1714-62].)
Among the German middle classes, however, the most widely disseminated substitute for the institutional religion that was so closely associated with princely dominance was in the mid-18th century neither poetry nor the visual arts, but an intense interest in personal feelings. The inner sanctum of pre-social identity,
which Pietism called the soul, and Leibnizianism called the monad, was given a secular form as the power of having emotions, and here at least the individual could feel master of his or her fate. Men and women alike found themselves in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), so that its German translation almost immediately provided the name of their culture of tears:
‘Empfi ndsamkeit’, ‘Sentimentalism’.
Their mentor was Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), though not all of Wieland’s readers perceived the extent to which his refi ned materialism undermined the security of their inner fastness. Another son of a pastor who was early troubled by religious doubts, after translating Shakespeare he eventually found his literary metier: the novel, or romance, set in an imaginary world, usually a schematic and sunlit classical antiquity, in which an amusing plot, psychologically subtle and fl irtatiously erotic, was recounted by a shrewd and ironical narrator. It was a compromise with the manner of Fielding, perfectly attuned to German circumstances. No risks were run through any direct representation of contemporary reality, but a kind of realism was none the less achieved. The effects of human emotions on the mind, on moral, philosophical, and political attitudes, were analysed with great delicacy in these novels (notably Agathon, fi rst edition 1767), in Wieland’s exquisite verse narratives (for example, Musarion, 1768), and in his letters. He was at the centre of a Germany-wide web of letter-writers who exchanged with each other thoughts and feelings, and thoughts about feelings, occasioned by the incidents of their uneventful lives or by the books they were reading (whether religious or, with increasing likelihood, not). The balance that, with a deceptive appearance of ease, he achieved between sense and reason in his thinking, and in his writing between imported and native traditions, Wieland also achieved in his personal affairs between officialdom and private enterprise. In 1769 he was appointed to a professorship of philosophy at the little university of Erfurt and three years later he accepted the invitation of Anna Amalia, regent
of the nearby duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to become tutor to her son Karl August, who was approaching his majority. Wieland took the Duchess’s shilling and settled in Weimar but he did not lose his independence. In 1773 he began a literary newspaper Der Teutsche Merkur (The German Mercury), in which his correspondence network went over seamlessly into print. It became the most successful periodical in southern Germany, and, though he eventually retired from full-time editorship, it provided him with a supplementary income for the rest of his long and productive life.
The Seven Years War, which in 1763 appeared to conclude with the triumph of the Protestant interest, inaugurated in Germany a new and more turbulent phase of cultural transformation.
The greatly heightened prestige of English culture after the war meant easier access to a free-thinking and individualist Enlightenment, which increased the friction between intellectuals and the social and political structure of absolutist Germany.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), for example, was the son of a pastor and studied theology in Leipzig, but the combined infl uences of English deism and of Gottsched’s favourite troupe of actors led him to abandon a clerical career for the uncertain life of a literary freelance. Having written plays since his teens he had his fi rst major success in 1755 with Miss Sara Sampson, virtually a manifesto for the English style. This fi rst German, or ‘bourgeois’ tragedy (bürgerliches Trauerspiel), with its indecisive seducer, virtuous victim, and sorrowing father, was an implausible attempt to put on the stage the Richardsonian multi-volume novel of sentiment. To that extent it subscribed to Gottsched’s view that the drama, not the novel, was to be the means of literary self-expression for the German middle classes. But in 1759
Lessing carried out the most effective literary assassination in the German language when in a single issue of his periodical he dismissed Gottsched’s ‘reforms’, put Shakespeare in the place of Gottsched’s French models, and pointed German writers looking for authentic local material to the home-grown story of Dr Faust (whom he envisaged as an Enlightenment seeker after truth, who could certainly not be condemned to eternal punishment). In the immediate aftermath of the war Lessing then wrote a comedy which confi rmed both his commitment to a realist literature of contemporary life and his distaste for the politics of Frederick the Great, whose campaigns had brought Silesia to Prussia but had devastated Dresden, Leipzig, and the Saxon economy: Minna von Barnhelm (published 1767) is the earliest German play to have been continuously in the repertoire since its publication, though its sardonic undertones have not always been appreciated.
Lessing seemed in the 1760s to be German literature’s most radical voice, indeed he was helping to redefi ne what literature was. As an ex-theologian, struggling to fi nd himself a niche in the private sector, and opposed to the authoritarianism of either state or church, he represented all the social interests that might lie behind a shift from rationalism to empiricism, and from French to English models. But he knew the precariousness of his position. In 1766 he published a theoretical treatise, Laocöon, which purported to differentiate literature from painting, but thereby implied an initial comparability between them and so prepared the way for the view that they were both after all only variations on the same human activity that would soon be known as ‘Art’. The ambiguity - was literature a power in its own right or did it belong with such other adornments of court life as the visual arts? - reflected Lessing’s awareness of his vulnerable social position and of the possibility that in Germany literature might not be able to establish itself as an economically and politically independent cultural authority. He spent the next three years as the house playwright for a doomed attempt by the Hamburg bourgeoisie to set up their own ‘National Theatre’. After its collapse he accepted that only if he compromised his principles could he make the decent living that would allow him to marry and settle down, and in 1770 he entered princely service as the librarian of the Duke of Brunswick in Wolfenbüttel. His last tragedy, Emilia Galotti (1772), was a bitter farewell to his earlier life, a story of the corrupting effect of absolute power both on the
prince who wields it and on his middle-class victims, whose only defence against him is moral and physical self-destruction.
The achievement of literary greatness through a disappointed love-affair with England was the unexpected outcome of the career of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), Germany’s most prominent natural scientist (he was professor of physics in Göttingen and the teacher of Gauss), and an entertaining and effective satirist of various fashionable intellectual follies. A subject of George III, whom he knew personally, he twice visited what he called ‘the Isles of the Blessed’, and admired English science, industry, literature, and political institutions. All his life he gathered materials for a comic novel in the English manner but what his literary executors found was far better than any completed pastiche of Fielding or Sterne would have been: the commonplace books in which day by day he had recorded ideas, fragments, reflections, turns of phrase, the fi rst, most varied, and most personal German collection of aphorisms, a form in which the English have never excelled:
In many a work of a famous man I would rather read what he cut out than what he has left in.
When he saw a midge fl y into the candle and it now lay in the throes of death he said: ‘Down with the bitter cup, you poor creature, a professor is watching, and is sorry for you.’
English geniuses go on ahead of fashion and German geniuses come along behind it.
If only Germany too could have a free and active middle class, outward-looking and confi dently realistic, individualistic to the point, if necessary, of eccentricity, and with a literature, and especially with novels, to match! That longing was the energy that powered the literary turmoil of the 1760s and 1770s, which has become known by the title of one of the minor plays it produced, Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). The theorist of the movement, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), an East Prussian from what is now Poland, spent his life in struggle with the dominant forces of secularization and absolutism. Despite a serious crisis of faith in the early 1770s he refused to bow to the authority of deist critique and remained a clergyman, but though therefore a state official he maintained a middle-class hostility to monarchs. He envisaged, but never quite achieved, a synthesis of aesthetics, theology, and the rapidly expanding fi eld of cultural anthropology, which he was one of the fi rst to attempt to organize: indeed, his conviction that the material circumstances of a people’s life, their skills, language, beliefs and artistic and literary practices, make up a single self-suffi cient and characteristic whole was instrumental in forming the modern concept of a ‘culture’. It was Leibnizian monadism applied to history. Individual human beings too, he thought, have a unique character, an ‘original genius’, which particularly through the medium of language can become a people’s common possession.
Literature, whether sacred or secular, is a tissue of individual and collective genius. Shakespeare was a ‘dramatic God’, a maker of worlds, but he could not be detached from the English culture which had formed him and which he then helped to form. It followed that Germany could not acquire a national literature like that of England or France merely by imitating English or French models: Germany had to identify and draw on its own resources, on its medieval past, its popular entertainments, its folk song.
At Strasbourg university in the winter of 1770-1 Herder met the man he thought capable of that task: Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832).
Goethe was exceptional among 18th-century German writers, and not just in his abilities: at least as a young man, he had no need to write for money, or even to work at all. He was a true bourgeois, a member of the upper middle class of the Imperial Free City of Frankfurt. His mother was the daughter of the town clerk, his father lived on his capital, and he studied law - fi rst at Leipzig (where he met Gottsched) and then at Strasbourg - more in order to occupy than to advance himself. He was spared the anxieties and necessities which drove his contemporaries into a creative compromise with their political masters and he might eventually have been lost to literature altogether. But Herder showed him how the traditions of the late-medieval and early-modern German towns that he embodied met the literary need of the moment and could in him re-enter the mainstream. On his return to Frankfurt, having proclaimed to his friends his conversion to Shakespeare, Goethe completed in six weeks the fi rst draft of a prose chronicle play, unlike anything in German before it, with 59 changes of scene, based on the memoirs of the early 16th-century robber baron Götz von Berlichingen, and with a cameo part for Martin Luther. He became increasingly interested in the 16th century, when German urban culture had been of European signifi cance, he studied Hans Sachs and imitated his verse, and like Lessing he began to think of re-dramatizing the story of Dr Faust. Goethe’s Strasbourg experience was, fundamentally, and thanks to Herder, linguistic: the discovery of the literary potential of the language of ordinary people outside the established educational, cultural, and political institutions. There is nothing like the language of the best scenes in Götz von Berlichingen (published 1773) in French or English literature of the time, except perhaps in the work of Robert Burns. A few acquaintances shared his experience and inspiration, notably Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-92) and Heinrich Leopold Wagner (1747-79), and they were the creative core of the Storm and Stress movement, though others made more noise.
Goethe’s greatness lay, however, in his ability to bring together all the strands of contemporary intellectual life (and in his being free to do so). In the 1770s and early 1780s, he poured out a cornucopia of lyrical poems, many of them the inspiration of a moment, some left unpublished for years, and nearly all of them unique in form: ballads, imitations of folk song, rhymed fragments that catch an emotion on the wing, full-length odes, mysterious chants, and unclassifi able poetic responses to - rather than meditations on - life, God, love, and Nature, some only half-emerged from the context of a letter or a diary. They have become some of his best-known works, not least because of their appeal to generations of composers. They are the product not just of the new intimacy with the spoken German language and German popular traditions that he gained in Strasbourg and of his intuitive response to Shakespeare’s symbolic use of natural imagery, but also of a confi dence, learned from Klopstock, in the vivifying poetic consciousness, and of an openness to the Pietist and Sentimentalist practice of self-scrutiny. Goethe sought and cultivated friendships through the Sentimentalist network, of which his own correspondence quickly became a valued part. An instinct seems to have told him that Wieland’s path of compromise had more future in Germany than any attempt to set up an autonomous middle-class culture, and he became increasingly aware of the tragic potential in the movement which saw him as the growing-point, or even the ‘Messiah’, of German literature. Götz von Berlichingen is an ambiguous play, and not just because its hero’s iron hand is a symbol both of strength and of emasculation. It tells two stories, one of Götz, who spends his life fi ghting to arrest the course of history and defend the old freedoms of the Holy Roman Empire, and one of his alter ego, Weislingen, who throws in his lot with the rising power of princely absolutism. But the zestful energy of the story-telling, by a poet in love with his subject matter, conceals that both life-plans end in a cul-de-sac: Götz fades away into admonitory irrelevance;
Weislingen succumbs to his own inner divisions. Götz was one of the fi rst consciously ‘historical’ works of imaginative literature and it was an important model for Walter Scott, who translated it. But its themes of political confl ict and personal destiny belonged to Goethe’s own time and generation, and in his next major work he succeeded in incorporating those themes into a realistic depiction of contemporary life, not in the compromise form of a virtually unstageable drama, but in the modern form par excellence, in a novel.
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 1774) made Goethe a European name, though the novel’s tragic plot depends on specifi cally German circumstances (and was based on a real event). It is a novel in letters, but since the letters all come from Werther and say nothing about their addressees they appear to be written to the book’s readers, who are thereby invited to see themselves as a circle of correspondents and Werther as one of their own. Even now the novel has an extraordinary power to draw its readers into the intoxicating logic of Werther’s hyperactive sensibility: the swings of mood in his response to the natural world; his obsessive love for Lotte, engaged, and then married, to another man; the disintegration of his mind as an ‘Editor’ steps in to piece together the evidence for the last days and hours before he shoots himself. What might make the book seem dated is actually the reason for its continuing modernity: for all the importance in it of the idea of ‘Nature’, it represents feelings not simply as spontaneous but as furnished to its characters, and to its readers too, by culture - by books and fashions. Its realism is social, even in matters of the mind. Werther wears the clothes and boots of an English country gentleman to demonstrate both his personal integrity and his independence of court and university and he and Lotte know they are soulmates because they both react to a thunderstorm with a reminiscence of the same ode by Klopstock. Werther’s story is therefore not simply the story of the self-destruction of a pathological individual, but like Emilia Galotti - and Lessing’s play is open beside him when he dies - he is driven to his death by social and political constraints as well. Halfway through his ‘affair’ with Lotte he attempts to escape from his emotions by taking a job as a state official. However, he has enough money - he is enough of a true bourgeois - not to be kept in the job by fi nancial necessity and he soon feels driven out of it, and back to his obsession with Lotte, by the exclusivism of the ruling nobility, who see in him a representative of the new class of upstart intellectual. With a specifi city the brilliance of which has faded little with time, Werther recounts the failure, in hostile economic and political conditions, of the bid from that class to establish a culture of its own on an English model. But the novel also shows the consequences of failure: the danger that the Sentimentalism which was the only alternative to revolt would run out of control and feeling would become detached from any external reality, even from life.
Werther destroys only himself. But the revolt of the ‘geniuses’, as those around Goethe were soon called, could extract a price from others too. At the same time as he was writing Werther Goethe was thinking about the 16th century again. But the version of the Faust legend that he was drafting was far from being a historical drama like Götz. He envisaged a ‘new’ Faust in which a light historical varnish would ease the introduction of a few unavoidable supernatural elements into an essentially modern plot. Apart from its fi rst three scenes, which show Faust as a magician who, in some unexplained way, acquires a diabolical companion, Mephistopheles, Goethe’s fi rst draft of his life’s work - usually called Urfaust (‘the original Faust’) - is an 18th-century seduction narrative which owes much to Richardson and little to the original chap-books and plays. There is no warrant in the tradition for the story of Faust’s liaison with a town-girl, Margarete (‘Gretchen’ is an affectionate diminutive), unless she is seen as this modern Faust’s modern Helen, as Goethe at one time probably intended. Goethe’s play is quite different, however, from other seduction stories of the time - Miss Sara Sampson, for example. The difference lies, fi rstly, in the character and motivation of the seducer. The fi rst scenes are not detachable from the rest of the action: Faust is no philanderer, his love-affair with Gretchen is a fulfi lment of the passionate urge he expresses in his opening monologue to leave behind the cerebral world of mere thought and embrace with all his senses the full human lot. He turns his back on the university - the only trace of princely Germany in the play’s social setting - and seeks reality in the life of the town, fi rst in its taverns and then in the little world of its hard-working but contented, Catholic,
inhabitants who seem untroubled by the yearnings that torment him, a free thinker, and probably a (former) Protestant. Yet his disquiet echoes their deeper needs too: because Gretchen can recognize in Faust the promise of some unknown, but not unreal, fulfi lment she can respond to him in desire, while Faust’s desire for her, at fi rst simply sensual, turns to love. The sympathetic realism with which her relatively lowly milieu is depicted - her sparsely furnished room, her homely turns of phrase, the gossip of her neighbours - has few parallels in contemporary literature (Goldsmith perhaps); the stark tragedy of her desperation in pregnancy, her alienation from her family, her infanticide, madness, and condemnation to a death she still fears, has none.
The malignant presence of Mephistopheles, who rejoices in her undoing, extends her tragedy to Faust. Her end seems to be her lover’s too and the revolt of this modern Faust seems, like that of his original, to lead him down to Hell, cast out even by the world with which he has fallen in love. But the signifi cance of this simple story, simply told, is enlarged and transfi gured as Goethe pours into it all the resources of the poems he was writing at the time.
Each of the concise, individual, almost disconnected scenes has its own mood, and most have their own time of day. The feeling soul, whose insistent longing for reality is imperiously articulated by Faust, enters into the texture of the play. The powerful visual themes around which the scenes are built up - Faust’s magic book, Gretchen combing her hair or offering fl owers to the Madonna - are enhanced by the rich imagery and rhythmic variety of Faust’s visions and Gretchen’s haunting songs, and by the terrible plausibility of her fi nal ramblings in prose. A bitter story of cultural defeat is transformed by Goethe’s poetry into a true tragedy of love and betrayal, ambition and guilt.
Lenz and Wagner, who both also treated the theme of the infanticide mother, shared Goethe’s empathy for popular speech, though without his ability to turn it into poetry. Lenz, however, achieved something almost as remarkable: his plays The Tutor (Der Hofmeister, 1774) and The Soldiers (Die Soldaten, 1776) are virtually novels about contemporary Germany. Dramatic structure is dissolved into a kaleidoscope of plots and snapshot scenes, but the dramatic form is used to create an extraordinary objectivity.
Lenz ruthlessly strips out any compromise with Sentimentalism and the monadic tradition: his characters have no inner life but are shown as functioning social mechanisms, manipulating each other through language. They may appear to be grotesques but they are still capable of suffering, and Lenz was as aware as Goethe of the tragic potential in his society. Läuffer, the tutor, in his play of that name, is an exemplar of the class of unemployed ex-theologians (Lenz himself was one) out of which German literature, and the Storm and Stress, emerged. But Läuffer is no Faust. He falls in love with his charge and caught between inescapable desire and equally inescapable oppression he gives up the struggle and emasculates himself. The failed revolt, a theme of many works of the Storm and Stress, was a historical reality though no one represented its true character as directly and painfully as Lenz. Lenz himself succumbed to mental illness, and most of his fellow-writers emigrated or otherwise fell silent.
Goethe, however, did not give up, though he considered emigration to Switzerland. In 1775 he did transplant himself, but within Germany. He broke off his work on Egmont, a play he had started to write on the 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spanish absolute rule, followed Wieland’s example, and settled in Weimar at the invitation of Duke Karl August, now 18 years old. At his suggestion Herder was summoned shortly afterwards to become the spiritual head of the duchy’s Lutheran Church. Goethe’s move from bourgeois Frankfurt was an acceptance of reality, of the primacy of princely Germany, and it both coincided with the peak of Storm and Stress and marked its passing. 1776 anyway put an end to the mid-century outburst of Anglophilia. Once England was at war with its American colonies it could no longer be represented simply as the land of the free. There was no longer an obvious external model for those who felt oppressed by conditions at home, and no longer an easy choice between the culture of the towns and the culture of the princes or between the empiricist and the rationalist Enlightenment. Germany would have to fi nd its own way out of its internal confl icts. In 1776 two high-voltage plays - The Twins (Die Zwillinge) by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger (1752-1831) and the more nuanced Julius von Tarent by Johann Anton Leisewitz (1752-1806) - gave expression to this new, or newly acute, dilemma, by means of the same dramatic motif: the murderous strife of two brothers. At the same time a rebellious schoolboy in Stuttgart, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), began drafting the defi nitive treatment of the theme, his fi rst play, The Robbers (Die Räuber), which took the reading public by storm on its publication in 1781, and reduced its audience to sobs and swoons when it was fi rst performed the following year.
Like the two wings of the German middle class, the bourgeois and the officials, Schiller’s two brothers are united by what divides them: they are both potential successors to the ancien régime represented by their father, the almost permanently moribund Count von Moor. Karl, the legitimate heir, has a high ethical sense but while at university is tricked into revolt by his younger brother, Franz. Franz, a materialist, determinist, and would-be atheist, puts on an appearance of subservience but is plotting not only to supplant his brother but to kill their father. Karl’s crimes as leader of a robber band, however, prove more real and more numerous than those of Franz and when the Count fi nally dies both brothers are equally responsible. But the succession falls to neither, for both have committed suicide - Franz literally, and Karl in effect, by surrendering himself to the power of the law, in order to expiate his wrongdoing. The moral authority of the dead father is the sole survivor of two collapsed insurrections, though it is unclear in what form that authority can now be embodied, since all existing legal institutions have been denounced as hopelessly corrupt. A modern, international audience can still be gripped by the story of Karl and his band, a prescient analysis of the logic of self-righteous terrorism in a moral void. The huge success of the play in Germany in its own time and subsequently was no
doubt due to the ferocity with which it dramatized the confl ict between the two value-systems available to the middle class in its struggle against princely rule - self-interested materialism or university-educated idealism - while it left prudently unassailed the structure of power itself. The future seemed to lie with a suitably chastened Karl rather than the rapaciously individualist Franz. Schiller’s late version of Storm and Stress was free of any hankerings after England and largely unaffected by Herder’s and Goethe’s desire to revive older German culture, especially that of the towns. Instead Schiller focussed, with the penetrating clarity of a born dramatist, on the political and moral fault-lines in his contemporary society. With The Robbers an independent modern German literary tradition begins.
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Author: Nicholas Boyle
