„Sie scheint auch mehr zu donnern und zu blitzen, als zu reden.“ Zur Meteorologisierung der Sprache im Drama der 1770er Jahre

Abstract

This article offers an account of wettern (weathering) in German drama of the 1770s, with focus on works by Goethe, Klinger, Lenz, and Herder. Extant scholarship on this period tends to stress the religious and rhetorical origins, as well as the allegorical function, of meteorological imagery. Against these readings, this article argues that instances of wettern must be read literally, insofar as the works under examination are informed by then-emerging meteorological science, whose hallmark is the synthesis of formerly separate phenomena (e.g., lightning, clouds, sunlight, storms) into a continuous process with a unified internal dynamic. On this account, the dynamization of weather in modern meteorology sparked a dynamization of rhetorical formula in German dramatic language, whereby wettern became prototypical of the dynamic speech that others have observed to appear in 1770s drama. To reveal the programmatic significance of wettern across these works, attention is given, first of all, to metafictional moments that assert a necessary relation between weather and drama as a medium, and, second, to the overlooked role of weather in Herder’s early theory of language, which was a formative influence on the authors considered here. In both cases, Lessing’s disparaging view of scientific and dramatic representations of meteorological phenomena is offered, by way of contrast, to show how the poetics of weather developed in and through wettern departed from the status quo of aesthetic theory.