Goethe and the Intellectual Revolt of Germany

This series has six easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: Exuberance of His Youth.

Introduction
The latter half of the eighteenth century was, throughout Europe, a period of revolt against the old ideas, the outworn bonds of medieval society. In art and literature the older system, with its elaborately planned rules and formulas, is technically called “classicism”; and the outburst against it established “romanticism,” the spirit of desire, the longing for higher things, an impulse which ruled the intellectual world for generations, and which many critics still believe to be the chief hope for the future.

Romanticism found expression, more or less impassioned and defiant, in every land, but its earliest and strongest impulse is generally regarded as having sprung from Germany. The skeptical, half-cynical rule of Frederick the Great had left men’s minds free, and imagination was everywhere aroused. The early culmination of its extravagance is found in the youth of Goethe and Schiller, Germany’s two greatest poets; and Goethe’s famous novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, became the text-book of the rising generation of romanticists. Werther kills himself for disappointed love, and the book has been seriously accused of creating an epidemic of suicide in Germany. Hillebrand, writer of the following analysis of the period and the movement, is among the foremost of early 20th. century German authorities upon the subject.

This selection is from German Thought During the Last Two Hundred Years by Karl Hillebrand published in 1880. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Karl Hillebrand (1829-1884), an academic, was born in Germany was educated and spent his early career there. After being arrested for his free-thinking writings, he escaped and who spent the rest of his career in France and Italy

Time: 1775
Place: Germany

Goethe was twenty-six years old when he accepted (1775) the invitation of Charles Augustus, and transported to Weimar the tone and the allures of the literary bohemia of Strasburg. There, to the terror of the good burghers of that small residence, to the still greater terror of the microscopic courtiers, began that “genial” and wild life which he and his august companion led during several years. Hunting, riding on horseback, masquerades, private theatricals, satirical verse, improvisation of all sorts, flirtation particularly, filled up day and night, to the scandal of all worthy folk, who were utterly at a loss to account for his serene highness saying “Du” to this Frankfort roturier. The gay Dowager Duchess, Wieland’s firm friend, looked upon these juvenile freaks with a more lenient eye; for she well knew that the fermentation once over, a noble, generous wine would remain. “We are playing the devil here,” writes Goethe to Merck; “we hold together, the Duke and I, and go our own way. Of course, in doing so we knock against the wicked, and also against the good; but we shall succeed; for the gods are evidently on our side.” Soon Herder was to join them there, unfortunately not always satisfied with the results of his teaching about absolute liberty of genius.

The whole generation bore with impatience the yoke of the established order, of authority under whatever form, whether the fetters were those of literary convention or social prejudice, of the state or the church. The ego affirmed its absolute, inalienable right; it strove to manifest itself according to its caprices, and refused to acknowledge any check. Individual inspiration was a sacred thing, which reality with its rules and prejudices could only spoil and deflower. Now, according to the temperament of each, they rose violently against society and its laws, or resigned themselves silently to a dire necessity. The one in Titanic effort climbed Olympus, heaving Pelion on Ossa; the other wiped a furtive tear out of his eye, and, aspiring to deliverance, dreamed of an ideal happiness. Sometimes in the same poet the two dispositions succeed each other.

Cover thy sky with vapor and clouds, O Zeus,” exclaims Goethe’s Prometheus, “and practise thy strength on tops of oaks and summits of mountains like the child who beheads thistles. Thou must, nevertheless, leave me my earth and my hut, which thou hast not built, and my hearth, whose flame thou enviest. Is it not my heart, burning with a sacred ardor, which alone has accomplished all? And should I thank thee, who wast sleeping whilst I worked?”

The same young man who had put into the mouth of the rebellious Titan this haughty and defiant outburst, at other moments, when he was discouraged and weary of the struggle, took refuge within himself. Like Werther, “finding his world within himself, he spoils and caresses his tender heart, like a sickly child, all whose caprices we indulge.” One or the other of those attitudes toward reality, the active and the passive, were soon taken by the whole youth of the time; and just as Schiller’s Brigands gave birth to a whole series of wild dramas, Werther left in the novels of the time a long line of tears. More than that, even in reality Karl Moor found imitators who engaged in an open struggle against society, and one met at every corner languishing Siegwarts, whose delicate soul was hurt by the cruel contact of the world.

What strikes us most in this morbid sentimentality is the eternal melancholy sighing after nature. Ossian’s cloudy sadness and Young’s dark Nights veil every brow. They fly into the solitudes of the forests in order to dream freely of a less brutal world. They must, indeed, have been very far from nature to seek for it with such avidity. Many, in fact, of these ardent, feverish young men became in the end a prey, some to madness, others to suicide. A species of moral epidemic, like that which followed upon the apparent failure of the Revolution in 1799, had broken out. The germ of Byronism may be clearly detected already in the Wertherism of those times. Exaggerated and overstrained imaginations found insufficient breathing-room in the world, and met on all sides with boundaries to their unlimited demands. Hearts, accustomed to follow the dictates of their own inspiration alone, bruised themselves against the sharp angles of reality. The thirst for action which consumed their ardent youth could not be quenched, in fact, in the narrow limits of domestic life; and public life did not exist. Frederick had done great things, but only, like the three hundred other German governments, to exclude the youth of the middle classes from active life. Thence the general uneasiness. Werther was as much an effect as a cause of this endemic disease; above all, it was the expression of a general state of mind. It is this which constitutes its historical importance, while the secret of its lasting value is to be found in its artistic form.

Besides, if I may say so without paradox, the disease was but an excess of health, a juvenile crisis through which Herder, young Goethe, Schiller, and indeed the whole generation had to pass.

“Oh,” exclaimed old Goethe fifty years later in a conversation with young Felix Mendelssohn, “oh, if I could but write a fourth volume of my life! It should be a history of the year 1775, which no one knows or can write better than I. How the nobility, feeling itself outrun by the middle classes, began to do all it could not to be left behind in the race; how liberalism, Jacobinism, and all that devilry awoke; how a new life began; how we studied and poetized, made love and wasted our time; how we young folk, full of life and activity, but awkward as we could be, scoffed at the aristocratic propensities of Messrs. Nicolai and Co., in Berlin, who at that time reigned supreme.” “Ah, yes, that was a spring, when everything was budding and shooting, when more than one tree was yet bare, while others were already full of leaves. All that in the year 1775!”

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