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. 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 Ḥāfeẓ 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.