If literary historians agree on anything, it is that Weimar Classicism as a distinct literary period ought not to exist. And of course they are right. Literary periodization is heuristic and even arbitrary under the best of circumstances. But to assert that the efforts of two men, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), from the time of the former’s eye-opening journey to Italy in 1786 to the death of the latter in 1805, constitute a literary period in its own right seems excessive. Not only is the membership of the putative period so small (we...

Are there german classics?” Nietzsche poses this question in the second volume of Human, All Too Human.¹ He cites Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuves’s (1804–69) essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?” (What Is a Classic?) in the Causeries du lundi (Monday Lectures, 1851), where we read that “the word ‘classic’ does not suit the genius of certain literatures. For instance, nobody could talk seriously of ‘German classics.’ ”² But that is precisely what happened with increasing frequency in Germany in the course of the nineteenth century. The concept of the classical was used in an inflationary manner. In Einen Jux will er sich...

Weimar classicism can be said to begin in 1786 when Goethe places his Iphigenie on the rocky shores of Tauris, longing for home, “das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend” (HA 5:7; seeking the land of the Greeks with her soul). The search for Greece, for a distant poetic homeland where one could find the beauty, harmony, and fulfillment lacking in the modern world, captivated an entire generation. Not only Goethe and Schiller, but their contemporaries from Lessing, Klopstock (1724—1803), and Wieland to the younger Jena Romantics shared the search for Iphigenie’s Greece. Although the term “Weimar Classicism”...

The goethe-schiller correspondence is a monument of Weimar Classicism and a banquet for the student of Weimar culture inasmuch as it records the literary, aesthetic, scientific, editorial, and personal exchanges of the two central figures of the tradition. Beginning in 1794, when Schiller invited Goethe to contribute to a new literary journal, and continuing with frequent, often daily, communications until Schiller’s death in 1805, the epistolary collaboration comprises over 1,000 letters that provide a wide range of data, opinions, and ideas not available in any other documentation of the period. Indeed, literary historians have often expressed regret that the two...

Anyone who has become familiar with the loci of Classical Weimar can place Herder on the city map: the Herderplatz is on the open, visible side of the Stadtkirche of Saints Peter and Paul — long since, of course, renamed the Herderkirche — just off the city center, where Herder preached and is buried. The plaza is adorned with a statue of the famous man. Overshadowed by the church, on the other side, “back of ” it, as Herder often said, is the street where the parsonage is located, where Herder and his growing family lived from his arrival in Weimar in...

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the dramas of “Goetheundschiller” stood for Weimar Classicism. The major plays of this touching amalgam of Germany’s greatest playwrights were understood to embody the bourgeois ideology of Humanität and Bildung, which married Schiller’s Kantianism to the new classicism brought by Goethe from Italy. The resulting modified neoclassicism, synthesized from the French and English (particularly Shakespearean) dramatic traditions, undergirds modern German literature and identity. The assertions implicit in this summary are largely true. Nevertheless, the common view overlooks a crucial point: Goethe and Schiller sought to educate the German public not through drama,...

The concept of the “classical” is always retrospective in its attributions. This is the lesson conveyed by a remarkable special exhibition devoted to the artworks of ancient Greece, primarily sculpture, which was organized at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin during the spring of 2002.² We have become accustomed, at least since the studies by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the mid-eighteenth century,³ to regard the artworks of antiquity under the concept of the classical, above all with reference to the highpoint of this tradition in Athens during the fifth century B.C. The norm of the classical in art, whether in reference to...

Awareness of stylistic technique is necessary to aesthetic appreciation; but formal analysis is not sufficient for criticism. In the case of the novel, which, as Henry James (1843–1916) insisted, is an “ado about something,”² the “formalistic fallacy” is peculiarly inappropriate. Unless we appreciate the status of the material deployed — unless we have some idea of what is being related to what — we are in no position to grasp the meaning of the resultant structure. It is, therefore, part of the scholarly business of literary history to provide an adequate sense of the significance of a writer’s subject matter, by...

The classification of texts by women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is notoriously difficult.¹ Often considered trivial, the works of women writers of this period have remained below the radar screen of many literary histories. Efforts to remedy the omission and add these stray texts to the existing canon are often thwarted by the nature of the works themselves and by the precarious situation of their female authors. Female authorship constituted a transgression against contemporary gender norms. Consequently, women writers strove to downplay or hide their literary activities.² They did not formulate literary programs, rarely shared...

In june 1796, Jean Paul, who had only just become a successful writer with his novel Hesperus (published 1795), visited Weimar. Goethe and Schiller were intrigued at the prospect of meeting him and read his novel in anticipation. Their impression was mixed. The author of the book, wrote Schiller in a letter to Goethe dated 28 June 1796, is “fremd wie einer, der aus dem Mond gefallen ist, voll guten Willens und herzlich geneigt, die Dinge außer sich zu sehen, nur nicht mit dem Organ, mit dem man sieht” (alien, like one who has come from the moon, full of...

In 1750, in the first paragraph of his Aesthetica, Frankfurt professor Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714—62) defines this brand-new intellectual discipline as “scientia cognitionis sensitivae” (the science of sensate knowledge). But unfortunately — at least for those who value neatness in history — most of the major thinkers who follow (Kant being the notable exception) either forget or neglect or simply discard this definition, concentrating instead on a pair of important, but subordinate concepts in Baumgarten’s system — art and beauty — which are understood henceforward as the true content of “aesthetics.” Once this deetymologizing move has been made (aistheta, in Greek, are simply...

Many consider the birth of Weimar Classicism to have occurred because of a scientific debate: the friendship of the two greats of German classicism, Schiller and Goethe, began in 1794 over a heated, but ultimately friendly, discussion about the metamorphosis of plants. Although Goethe had known Schiller since 1788, they were not friends. Goethe had moved beyond his Sturm und Drang period and was repelled by the strong, emotional tone of Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) and Don Carlos (1787). He believed that his aesthetic and philosophical differences with Schiller were too great ever to permit friendship or collaboration....

The period covered by this volume, from the publication of some central classical works in 1787 to Schiller’s death in 1805, roughly coincides with the period of the impact of the French Revolution in Germany and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.¹ The events from the storming of the Bastille in 1789 to Napoleon’s declaration in 1799 that the Revolution had ended were almost as cataclysmic for mentalities in Germany as they were in France. In literature the importance of this political matrix was so great that many newer histories of German literature identify the epoch of German Classicism...