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. 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. 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.