User:Igni/Notes

Tangentially notable articles: Age of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, Weimar Classicism, Sturm und Drang, Sensibility, Age of Reason, Romanticism, Classicism

German Classicism and Romanticism


 * Classicism: 1775 – 1794 – 1805 – 1832
 * Romanticism: 1797 – 1805 – 1835

Flanked by:
 * German Enlightenment / Aufklärung (1720-1770)
 * Sturm und Drang / Storm and Stress (1770-85)

Classicism and Romanticism


 * Biedermeier (1820-1860)
 * Das junge Deutschland (1830-1850)
 * Realism (1850-1890)
 * Naturalism (1880-1900)

Other events

German Classicism: First mention
 * 1776 American Declaration of Independence (1783 Am. Independence, 1789 George Washington 1st President)
 * 1778 Deaths of Rousseau and Voltaire
 * 1782 Watt invents the steam engine
 * 1783 First balloon flights
 * 1784 Kant: ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’
 * 1786 Cartwright’s mechanical loom
 * 1789 Storming of the Bastille (14 July): French Revolution
 * 1791 Mozart dies (*1756)
 * 1792 First French Republic; French war with Austria (peace treaty of Lunéville 1801)
 * 1796 Napoleon invades Italy; Egypt (1798)
 * 1805 Battle of Trafalgar
 * 1806 Battle of Jena and Auerstedt: Napoleon victorious over Prussia and Russia
 * 1811 Fichte 1st Rector of University of Berlin (1810)
 * 1812 Napoleon retreats from Moscow
 * 1813-15 German War of Liberation (Treaty of Paris 1814)
 * 1814 Stephenson’s Rocket
 * 1815 Battle of Waterloo; Deutscher Bund (39 + 4 states)
 * 1818 Karl Marx born
 * 1819 Karlsbader Beschlüsse: censorship of newspapers & publications under 20 sheets; student fraternities prohibited; dismissal of ‘revolutionary’ univ. teachers
 * 1827 Ohm’s Law
 * 1830 Accession of Louis Philippe. Independence of Belgium. Unrest in Poland, Germany, Ireland and Italy.
 * 1831 Silk weavers’ revolt in France.
 * 1832 Secret Republican movement ‘Young Italy’
 * 1833 Abolition of slavery in Britain [Comment: this was the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. It had been confirmed to be illegal in Britain in 1772 in a court decision known as the Mansfield or Somerset decision --Kjb 16:04, 5 August 2007 (UTC)]
 * 1834 Workers uprisings in Lyon and Paris Inquisition abolished in Spain. German craftsmen in Paris form ‘Bund der Geächteten’ (1836: ‘Bund der Gerechten’, 1847 ‘Bund der Kommunisten’)
 * 1835 Nürnberg-Fürth railway
 * 1838 Chartists’ Movement in London (demand 10-hour working day for women & children 1847)
 * 1837 Accession of Queen Victoria (–1902)
 * Heinrich Laube: Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 1839:
 * 1) Ch.5: ‘Das Klassisch-Deutsche’

German Classicism: Dating problems


 * 1775 Goethe –> Weimar
 * 3.9.1786–18.6.1788 Goethe in Italy (cf. Italienische Reise, 1817, 1829)
 * 1788 Schiller –> Jena
 * 1794 Friendship between Goethe and Schiller (Letter from Schiller to Goethe, 20.8.1794)
 * 1805 Death of Schiller
 * Most of Goethe’s ‘classical’ works pre-date the Goethe-Schiller friendship

The two main figures

Weimar in late 18th- early 19th century
 * Goethe 1749–1832
 * Weimar: ‘ein Mittelding zwischen Dorf und Hofstadt’    (Herder)

Influences on Goethe and Schiller

‘eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Größe’: Laokoon
 * Adam Fr. Oeser: ‘eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Größe’ (‘noble simplicity and still greatness’) > Winckelmann Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755)

German Classicism

Weimarer Schloss
 * Conscious rejection of the intellectual one-sidedness of the Enlightenment and the emotional primacy of the Sturm und Drang
 * Collaboration based on mutual respect and encouragement
 * Aim for harmony and balance (‘Ausgleich’)
 * A literary phenomenon, confined to two/three writers in a tiny German backwater

Schiller’s house in Weimar

Weimar Court Theatre 1779–1825 Goethe: Director 1791-1817 Goethe to Eckermann, 2 April 1829
 * Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke.

‘romantisch’


 * Originally < OF ‘romanz’: court epic written in lingua romana – vernacular


 * 17th & 18th c.: something from a ‘Roman’, i.e. prose epic, and therefore derogatory


 * 18th c.: sth. unreal, exaggerated, wild, fanciful, filled with passion


 * Landscapes and nature that were wild and untamed, unruled and unruly, uncultivated, sparsely populated with ruined buildings


 * Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

German Romanticism

German Romanticism
 * Two ‘periods’ / ‘schools’:
 * 1797-1805: Jena/Berlin (1798ff.)
 * 1) Fr. & A.W. Schlegel & wives Dorothea & Karoline; Tieck; Wackenroder; Novalis; Schelling
 * Early Romantics:
 * 1) Theorists
 * 2) Interest in the novel

Anti-Enlightenment

Friedrich Schlegel (1800)
 * August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845): ‘Kritik an der Aufklärung’ (1801)
 * Tieck: Der gestiefelte Kater (1797): Comedy satirising the utilitarianism of the Enlightenment
 * E.T.A. Hoffmann: Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1820/22): Satire of the values of the Enlightenment and Empfindsamkeit
 * Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie.

Universalpoesie


 * Literature, painting, music, science, religion, philosophy, conduct of social and individual life
 * Clemens Brentano (1778-1842: 1837)
 * Ludwig Tieck
 * Zu jeder schönen Darstellung mit Farben gibt es gewiss ein verbrüdertes Tonstück, das mit dem Gemälde gemeinschaftlich nur eine Seele hat.
 * Caspar David Friedrich:
 * 1) Der Wanderer

Romantic Irony


 * Play with the reader and with the subject-matter, a realisation that things cannot be taken seriously, or at face value.
 * “Were you ever kept in a tightly stoppered bottle?”

Central image

‘die blaue Blume’ Legacy of German Classicism:
 * ‘die blaue Blume’
 * Symbol of the union of love, nature, and creation in all its forms, of heaven and earth, synthesis of past, present and future; symbol of an aspirational goal
 * ‘zweite Gipfelleistung der deutschen Literatur’ (Kurt Rothmann)
 * Notion of a German national literature
 * Renewal of classical humanistic and artistic values
 * Language used at a new level of expressiveness
 * Literature of an unparalled poetic beauty

Legacy of German Romantics:


 * Renewed interest in the Middle Ages
 * Translation of Shakespeare by A.W. Schlegel 1787-1810, 17 plays, compl. by Ludwig & Dorothea Tieck and Wolf Graf Baudissin (1825-40)
 * Study of the history of German language and literature (Brothers Grimm) and of law (Savigny)
 * Development of a German national consciousness
 * Notion of a schism between the world of the artist and that of the bourgeois
 * Carl Maria von Weber
 * Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra No: 1 in F Minor, Op. 73 (1811)