Storm and Stress

German Literature

Course 1 · Chapter 4 · Enlightenment & Sturm und Drang

In the eighteenth century German writing moved from the margins of European literature to a leading place. Writers argued for reason, tolerance and a theatre of their own, and then a younger generation rebelled in the name of feeling and genius. This chapter looks at the German Enlightenment and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, at the movement known as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), at the young Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and at Schiller's first plays. Names and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Enlightenment and Lessing

The German Enlightenment

The Aufklärung promoted reason, criticism and education, and writers argued about taste, religion and the purpose of art (check). Literature in German was still often seen as provincial next to French, and a goal of the period was to build a theatre and a critical culture of its own.

Lessing the critic

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 to 1781) wrote criticism, plays and philosophy. Laokoon (1766) argued about the different limits of poetry and painting, and his theatre criticism in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie pushed German drama away from French models (check).

Lessing's plays

Emilia Galotti (1772) is a middle-class tragedy set at a prince's court. Nathan der Weise (1779), a play of religious tolerance set in Jerusalem, centres on a Jewish merchant and has the parable of the three rings at its heart (check). It became one of the most performed and debated German plays.

Sturm und Drang

The name. It comes from a play of 1776 by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, whose title was later taken for the movement (check).
The spirit. A young generation of the 1770s valued feeling, nature, originality and the individual "genius" over rules and reason alone.
Herder. Johann Gottfried Herder encouraged writers to look to folk song and to the character of each people's language, ideas that later fed Romanticism (Chapter 6; check).
Shakespeare. Writers of the movement admired Shakespeare's freedom as a model against French classical rules.
A short phase. It lasted roughly from the late 1760s to the mid 1780s (check), and many of its leading figures moved on to a calmer style.

Goethe's Werther

Point (check each)	Note
The author	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt in 1749, was in his early twenties when he published Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774).
The form	An epistolary novel: letters from a sensitive young man to a friend, edited by a framing voice.
The story	Werther falls in love with Lotte, who is engaged to another man, and cannot bear his position; the book ends with his suicide.
The reaction	It was an immediate success across Europe and made Goethe famous. Readers dressed like Werther, and claims were made that the book prompted imitation; how far this happened is debated, and some authorities restricted it (check).

Handling the subject Werther ends with a suicide, and discussions of the novel's effect have sometimes been exaggerated. A careful account separates what is recorded, such as bans in some places and the book's strong emotional reception, from later legend (check). Goethe himself later distanced himself from the book's mood. If this subject is close to you, take care with the novel and talk to someone you trust.

Schiller's Early Plays

Friedrich Schiller (1759 to 1805) wrote Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781), a drama of two brothers and a band of outlaws, which was a sensation in its first stagings (check).
Later early plays. Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784), a middle-class tragedy of love across class lines, and Don Carlos (1787), a historical drama of political freedom (check).
Freedom as a theme. Schiller's work returns to political and personal freedom, which made him a figure of German national and liberal feeling in the following century.

A British comparison The closest British parallel is the early Romantic cult of feeling around Burns and Wordsworth, and the Gothic novel, which was fashionable at the same time. Werther can be set beside Richardson's and Goldsmith's novels of sentiment, and Schiller's rebellion beside the English reception of Shakespeare (check).

Check the details Dates, titles and claims about the effect of Werther are from general knowledge. Verify against a literary history and the edition you read, and remember that the movement's name and boundaries were fixed by later critics.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain what Lessing contributed to German literature as critic and as playwright, naming one work from each role.

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Exercise 2

List three values of Sturm und Drang and say how they differ from those of the Enlightenment.

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Exercise 3

Describe how you would test the claim that Werther caused a wave of imitations, and what you would call it if the evidence were thin.

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Quick Reference

Lessing: Laokoon, Emilia Galotti, Nathan der Weise (check)
Sturm und Drang: feeling, genius, nature, against rules
Goethe: Götz 1773, Werther 1774 (check)
Schiller: Die Räuber 1781, Kabale und Liebe, Don Carlos
The caution: the effect of Werther is debated