The Polarization of Utopian Idealism and Practical Politics in the Idyll: The Role of the First "Brautigam" in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea

Abstract

For German intellectuals the decisive turning point of the French Revolution occurred in 1793-94. This change in attitudes was marked by three events: the execution of the king in January 1793, the escalation of the wars of into wars of exploitation, and the consolidation of power in the hands of Robespierre and the Jacobins in the form of the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety after July 1793. Even for the intellectuals who had until that point supported the revolution, these three developments touched on a cultural and national nerve and resulted in a massive polarization of political feeling during and after 1793. The execution of the king was an act against the sovereign monarch, whose position was still central to German enlightened political theory; the war of liberation threatened to turn Germany into a looting ground, supplying food and money for the revolution; and the political tactics of the Jacobins represented an affront to the ideals of humanity and democracy implicit in enlightened thought. The German intellectuals' perception of the early stages of the revolution as an experiment in practical enlightenment was shattered by the reality of the new historical development in France, with its dictatorship, its brutality and its mass repression. The consequent polarization of political thought in Germany, and the discrediting of the process of modernization and redefinition of political and social categories in France becomes, from this period onward, a touchy subject for German writers. Hermann und Dorothea was written in the wake of this