The Ballad’s Years of Travel

Abstract

Abstract The art ballad entered German literature in the mid-eighteenth century, but it truly began its dominance with the so-called ballad year 1797, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller volleyed back and forth an evolving set of formally ambitious variations on popular themes. This entrance into the German literary canon decisively inflected the cultural presuppositions and political anxieties that attached to the new form of the art ballad. In the British Isles, the ballad had become an object of interest after the Act of Union (1707): it told national histories belonging to nations understood to belong to the past. In Germany, the national community to which these poems addressed themselves was located in the future. In the British Isles, the ballad had begun reaching a broader literary public under empiricist premises, and the questions around balladry were about provenance, authenticity, and evidence. The initial German discourse around balladry drew heavily on the British conversation but did so with a temporal lag and under radically different premises. When Goethe and Schiller undertook their ballad research, they constituted a new and explicitly invented canon of poems in a network with other writers, but also with composers, visual artists, and others. Authenticity alternated with irony throughout their efforts, and their ballads manage to tell stories of both ancient memories and decidedly contemporary media. This was to shape the German ballad going forward: while it could often seem nostalgic, the form was ideally positioned to register historic change and modernization as it occurred.