Reflections on the "Classical Age" of German Literature

Abstract

Reflections on the '‘Classical Age' of German Literature VICTOR LANGE I The efflorescence of philosophical and literary energy at the end of the eighteenth century that drew the German men of letters into the mainstream of European modernism was the result of a remarkable variety of historical impulses, of an interplay of political, intellectual, and aesthetic experiences that gives to that period its especially fas­ cinating character, Germany was a social entity far more heterogene­ ous and provincial than England or France: economically retarded, feudal in its power structure, and only slowly moving towards the emancipation of an effective middle class, dispersed over a barely surveyable plurality of regional forms of life and allegiances, and with­ out the advantages of a center of cultural life. A community of lan­ guage and of fervent if divided religious faith rather than of social or political solidarity, it was within a few decades forced to assess its potentialities, to abandon its peripheral role in Europe, to articulate its self-consciousness, and to create a philosophical and literary idiom of unmistakable native strength. From an experience of disparity, frustration, and vision, the most clear-sighted among its writers 3 4 / VICTOR LANGE fashioned the language of modernism which in turn shaped the Euro­ pean imagination well into the nineteenth century. Historians of culture have often enough described the features of this encounter, the state of mind which produced a canon of al­ together unpredictably original works for which the term “German classicism” seemed appropriate. Ever since the demonstrated predilec­ tion of the age itself for definition and synthesis, ever since the efforts, in the writings of Herder or Goethe, at distinguishing their sense of radical modernity from that long tradition of mere modifications of established orthodoxies, the second half of the century seemed in Germany to reveal a pattern of purpose of truly revolutionary logic: beginning with the entry of Prussia into the concert of European powers and culminating at the moment of Napoleon’s defeat, the epoch was understood as the record of an astonishing triumph of capabilities that had hitherto been scattered and merely emulative but that had now assumed a distinctive character of their own. But this unitary view, so plausible to a nineteenth-century German society that revered the period as the ground on which its idealistic self-portrait could be traced, has in recent critical scholarship been dramatically challenged. It is this revision that I should like briefly to summarize. The topography which is usually taken to encompass the German “classical” period is not easy to delimit: it includes some of the territo­ rial landmarks of the more orthodox Enlightenment, the magisterial figures of Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Lichtenberg, the resonant work of Winckelmann, the philological genius of Hamann, the strange Miltonic view of Klopstock, and, above all, Holderlin, barely ac­ knowledged at the time, yet the greatest lyrical poet of the age. But in a narrower focus it extends roughly from Goethe’s break with the political demands made upon him after 1775 by the provincial court in Weimar, that is, from his departure for Italy in 1786, to the death in 1805 of Schiller, for nearly ten years Goethe’s closest collaborator. These two men, and a small group of congenial contributors, created not so much an aesthetic theory as a body of reflections on contempo­ rary culture, a system of faith and action directed against the spiritual and political climate of the day, above all against the indications of The “Classical Age” of German Literature I 5 sympathy, however disjointed, for the impulses and prospects of the French Revolution. It was this canon of writing and discourse, developed in Weimar and in the neighboring university town of Jena, that seemed at the time to offer to German and foreign observers a peculiarly impressive crystallization of widely admired contemporary and national convictions. If a number of German men of letters explicitly dissociated themselves from the Weimar establishment, and from the offered notions of the role of art in the shaping of a new society, they appeared nevertheless to many witnesses, for instance to Mme de Stael, to be part of a prevailing climate of opinion. In Mme de...