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Rh in the “Bund,” the members of this coterie were drawn from the peasant class of the lower bourgeoisie; J. H. Voss (1751–1826), the leader of the “Bund,” was a typical North German peasant, and his idyll, Luise (1784), gives a realistic picture of German provincial life. L. H. C. Hölty (1748–1776) and J. M. Miller (1750–1814), again, excelled in simple lyrics in the tone of the Volkslied. Closely associated with the Göttingen group were M. Claudius (1740–1815), the Wandsbecker Bote—as he was called after the journal he edited—an even more unassuming and homely representative of the German peasant in literature than Voss, and G. A. Bürger (1748–1794) who contributed to the Göttinger Musenalmanach ballads, such as the famous Lenore (1774), of the very first rank. These ballads were the best products of the Göttingen school, and, together with Goethe’s Strassburg and Frankfort songs, represent the highest point touched by the lyric and ballad poetry of the period.

But the Göttingen “Bund” stood somewhat aside from the main movement of literary development in Germany; it was only a phase of Sturm und Drang, and quieter, less turbulent than that on which Goethe had set the stamp of his personality. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) had, as a student in Leipzig (1765–1768), written lyrics in the Anacreontic vein and dramas in alexandrines. But in Strassburg, where he went to continue his studies in 1770–1771, he made the personal acquaintance of Herder, who won his interest for the new literary movement. Herder imbued him with his own ideas of the importance of primitive history and Gothic architecture and inspired him with a pride in German nationality; Herder convinced him that there was more genuine poetry in a simple Volkslied than in all the ingenuity of the German imitators of Horace or Anacreon; above all, he awakened his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. The pamphlet Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), to which, besides Goethe and Herder, the historian Justus Möser (1720–1794) also contributed, may be regarded as the manifesto of the Sturm und Drang. The effect on Goethe of the new ideas was instantaneous; they seemed at once to set his genius free, and from 1771 to 1775 he was extraordinarily fertile in poetic ideas and creations. His Götz von Berlichingen (1771–1773), the first drama of the Sturm und Drang, was followed within a year by the first novel of the movement, Werthers Leiden (1774); he dashed off Clavigo and Stella in a few weeks in 1774 and 1775, and wrote a large number of Singspiele, dramatic satires and fragments—including Faust in its earliest form (the so-called Urfaust)—not to mention love-songs which at last fulfilled the promise of Klopstock. Goethe’s lyrics were no less epoch-making than his first drama and novel, for they put an end to the artificiality which for centuries had fettered German lyric expression. In all forms of literature he set the fashion to his time; the Shakespearian restlessness of Götz von Berlichingen found enthusiastic imitators in J. M. R. Lenz (1751–1792), whose Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774) formulated theoretically the laws, or defiance of laws, of the new drama, in F. M. von Klinger (1752–1831), J. A. Leisewitz (1752–1806), H. L. Wagner (1747–1779) and Friedrich Müller, better known as Maler Müller (1749–1825): The dramatic literature of the Sturm und Drang was its most characteristic product—indeed, the very name of the movement was borrowed from a play by Klinger; it was inspired, as Götz von Berlichingen had been, by the desire to present upon the stage figures of Shakespearian grandeur impelled and tortured by gigantic passions, all considerations of plot, construction and form being regarded as subordinate to the development of character. The fiction of the Sturm und Drang, again, was in its earlier stages dominated by Werthers Leiden, as may be seen in the novels of F. H. Jacobi (1743–1819) and J. M. Miller, who has been already mentioned. Later, in the hands of J. J. W. Heinse (1749–1803), author of Ardinghello (1787), Klinger, K. Ph. Moritz (1757–1793), whose Anton Reiser (1785) clearly foreshadows Wilhelm Meister, it reflected not merely the sentimentalism, but also the philosophic and artistic ideas of the period.

With the production of Die Räuber (1781) by Johann Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), the drama of the Sturm und Drang entered upon a new development. Although hardly less turbulent in spirit than the work of Klinger and Leisewitz, Schiller’s tragedy was more skilfully adapted to the exigencies of the theatre; his succeeding dramas, Fiesco and Kabale und Liebe, were also admirable stage-plays, and in Don Carlos (1787) he abandoned prose for the iambic blank verse which Lessing had made acceptable in Nathan der Weise. The “practical” character of the new drama is also to be seen in the work of Schiller’s contemporary, O. von Gemmingen (1755–1836), the imitator of Diderot, in the excellent domestic dramas of the actors F. L. Schröder (1744–1816) and A. W. Iffland (1759–1814), and even in the popular medieval plays, the so-called Ritterdramen of which Götz von Berlichingen was the model. Germany owes to the Sturm und Drang her national theatre; permanent theatres were established in these years at Hamburg, Mannheim, Gotha, and even at Vienna, which, as may be seen from the dramas of C. H. von Ayrenhoff (1733–1819), had hardly then advanced beyond Gottsched’s ideal of a national literature. The Hofburgtheater of Vienna, the greatest of all the German stages, was virtually founded in 1776.

(b) German Classical Literature.—The energy of the Sturm und Drang, which was essentially iconoclastic in its methods, soon exhausted itself. For Goethe this phase in his development came to an end with his departure for Weimar in 1775, while, after writing Don Carlos (1787), Schiller turned from poetry to the study of history and philosophy. These subjects occupied his attention almost exclusively for several years, and not until the very close of the century did he, under the stimulus of Goethe’s friendship, return to the drama. The first ten years of Goethe’s life in Weimar were comparatively unproductive; he had left the Sturm und Drang behind him; its developments, for which he himself had been primarily responsible, were distasteful to him; and he had not yet formed a new creed. Under the influence of the Weimar court, where classic or even pseudo-classic tastes prevailed, he was gradually finding his way to a form of literary art which should reconcile the humanistic ideals of the 18th century with the poetic models of ancient Greece. But he did not arrive at clearness in his ideas until after his sojourn in Italy (1786–1788), an episode of the first importance for his mental development. Italy was, in the first instance, a revelation to Goethe of the antique; he had gone to Italy to find realized what Winckelmann had taught, and here he conceived that ideal of a classic literature, which for the next twenty years dominated German literature and made Weimar its metropolis. In Italy he gave Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787) its final form, he completed Egmont (1788)—like the exactly contemporary Don Carlos of Schiller, a kind of bridge from Sturm und Drang to classicism—and all but finished Torquato Tasso (1790). Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796) bears testimony to the clear and decisive views which he had acquired on all questions of art and of the practical conduct of life.

Long before Wilhelm Meister appeared, however, German thought and literature had arrived at that stability and self-confidence which are the most essential elements in a great literary period. In the year of Lessing’s death, 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the great philosopher, had published his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and this, together with the two later treatises, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788) and Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), placed the Germans in the front rank of thinking nations. Under the influence of Kant, Schiller turned from the study of history to that of philosophy and more especially aesthetics. His philosophic lyrics, his treatises on Anmut und Würde, on the Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), and Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795) show, on the philosophic and the critical side, the movement of the century from the irresponsible subjectivity of Sturm und Drang to the calm idealism of classic attainment. In the same way, German historical writing had in these years, under the leadership of men like Justus Möser, Thomas Abbt, I. Iselin, F. C. Schlosser, Schiller himself and, greatest of all, Johannes von Müller (1752–1809), advanced from disconnected, unsystematic chronicling to a clearly thought-out philosophic and scientific method. J. G. A.