delit1-1, Exercise 3: A literature before its state

Model answer (check the details):

How it can happen: a literature needs a shared language and a reading public, not a shared government. Until 1871 the German-speaking lands were divided into many states, yet writers, printers and readers moved among them and used one written standard, shaped by Luther's Bible and print. Weimar around 1800 was a small court town, but its writers addressed all German readers.

Difference it makes to how writers are read: because there was no political nation, literature became a place where the idea of a German nation was imagined. Goethe, Schiller and later writers were claimed as national voices, and the phrase "land of poets and thinkers" arose. Readers should ask how far that was the writers' own aim and how far it was later nationalist use, particularly given the twentieth century.