History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
The classic periods of literature, art, or philosophy tend to be brief. An aesthetic harmony that can never arise on the basis of a falsification of reality, a turning away from its contradictions, has social prerequisites that can rarely be effective for a long time. It is precisely the combination of ruthless truthfulness with beauty that constitutes the essence of classicism, in contrast to its degeneracy, to pseudo-classicism and academism. In general, social contradictions are either too sharp or too undeveloped to give the relationships between people clear, expressive and beautiful contours, so that in the course of history up to now it has only been possible to achieve beauty in brief, exceptional states of being, without neglecting unabashed artistic veracity. The chances of a whole period of this kind, of becoming a Raphael, Mozart or Pushkin, are very small and only last for a short time. Due to the circumstances described, this applies to Germany even more than to other countries. Goethe is perfectly clear about the foundations of German Classicism. He goes so far as to doubt its possibility for Germany even in the midst of the classical period. In 1795 he wrote about the question of why there could be no classic writers in the true sense of the word in Germany: “Anyone who considers it an indispensable duty to combine certain concepts with the words that he uses in speaking or writing, will use the expressions classic author and classic work very rarely. When and where does a classic national author emerge? When in the history of his nation he finds great events and their consequences in a happy and meaningful unity; if he does not lack greatness in the sentiments of his countrymen, depth in their sentiments, and strength and consistency in their actions; when he himself, imbued with the national spirit, feels capable, through an indwelling genius, of sympathizing with the past as well as with the present; if he finds his nation at a high level of culture, so that his own education becomes easy for him; when he has collected a lot of material, sees before him perfect or only imperfect attempts by his predecessors and so many external and internal circumstances come together that he does not have to pay a heavy lesson, that he has to survey a great work in the best years of his life, to put it in order and capable of carrying out in a sense.”
From the very beginning, Goethe and with him Schiller clearly recognized the socio-historical problems of their classical endeavors. The tremendous importance of their writings, which theoretically outline the essence of this period (in addition to Schiller’s aesthetic writings, Goethe’s Der Sammler und die Seinigen and the correspondence between the two of them should be mentioned in particular) lies in the fact that they treat the problematic of their own efforts as historically objective, they necessarily recognize and derive the specific formal laws of modern art, namely a contemporary classicism, precisely from this contradictory basis.
The recognition of this problem is an epoch-making event for European literary history. Of course, since the end of the eighteenth century there have been various attempts to determine the nature of modern literature in comparison with that of antiquity. However, these attempts are mostly of an empirical nature and can therefore grasp neither the unique size nor the unique problems of modern art, the theory of which was actually founded historically and aesthetically in the German classical period.
But for Goethe and Schiller, every theoretical justification is only preliminary work for literary practice. German Classicism is important in world literature as a bridge from the realism of the Enlightenment to the great realism of the first half of the nineteenth century. It can be such a bridge, because intellectually and artistically it takes over the legacy of the Enlightenment (a conscious break with the aesthetics of the Enlightenment only occurs with Balzac), although the work of Goethe and Schiller focuses on the new problems of the state of the world created with the French Revolution and knowledge in theory and practice is directed towards the changed validity of the old, eternal formal laws taken from antiquity and towards the corresponding formation of the new material.
Even this outline of the aesthetic question shows that German Classicism could only be a short interlude on a narrow basis. Strictly speaking, it covers a period of about ten years (1794-1805) in the lives of two brilliant writers. Of course one can stretch the boundaries somewhat, accepting Goethe’s Iphigenia-Tasso period, Schiller’s classical poems as prelude and Goethe’s Winckelmann and Pandora as postlude. But even then the actual classical period ends with the Battle of Jena. It is historically symbolic that both the first part of Goethe’s Faust and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit came to an end around this time.
This is no coincidence. The socio-psychological basis of German Classicism is the French Revolution and the new world situation it created. But this basis can promote the classics only so long as the German writers are able to relate to them as directly uninvolved spectators. On the other hand, the great realism of the first half of the nineteenth century in France and England only began when writers (Scott, Balzac, Stendhal) were able to look back historically at the end of the revolutionary period. As soon as – and this occurs after 1806 – the world situation demands political decisions from the German people, the classic spectator role of literature comes to an end. No real popular movements arose in the course of the struggles against Napoleon in Germany, no matter how much the fate of the German people remained dependent on foreign powers and domestic despots, for the first time since the sixteenth century the German people were faced with a real choice.
The radically changed political and social situation naturally changed the literary problems with which we will deal in the next chapter. And although Goethe did not allow himself to be ousted from his path, although even now, almost entirely on his own, he still remained a great literary power, the time is no longer determined by him and his classical aspirations, but by Romanticism. The decisive change in the literary atmosphere naturally also had an effect on Goethe’s compositional style, so that the really Weimarian style which combines Reineke Fuchs, Wilhelm Meister and Hermann und Dorothea with one another and with Wallenstein must give way to a more modern depiction that makes use of the modern “barbaric avant-garde”.
Ever since the debates of that time, it has been a commonplace that the German classics cut themselves off from life in an aristocratic-aesthetic and stylized manner. Such commonplaces tend to contain a grain of truth, but also many distortions of the actual facts. The basic attitude of German Classicism is undoubtedly an aesthetic-contemplative one. But first of all, this aesthetic is the result of a great tragedy, typically German, because it is rooted in German misery. We have already emphasized that the collapse of Goethe in Weimar and the failure of Georg Forster in Mainz marked the end of the German Enlightenment movement. It may be added that Schiller experienced a similar tragedy on his way from The Robbers to Don Carlos. His youth was filled with the dramatic portrayal of the revolutionaries’ moral problems. The constant tragic dichotomy of his early dramas: Brutus or Catilina was, from a political and moral point of view, also a practical problem of the revolution itself. On the way to creation, Schiller encountered the outer and inner barriers of German society and finally recognized the failure of his revolutionary efforts. For Goethe and Schiller, therefore, the rule of the aesthetic means a renunciation from the outset. None of them was born only to be a writer; the German misery forced both of them to live purely as poets. But precisely because this is the case, their resignation to aesthetics is neither aestheticist nor weak. For German Classicism, renunciation means trying to get as much as possible out of the situation that has become tragic, striving for the understanding of the time and thus for the preparation of a coming liberation of the people.
In historical reality, Germany is a contemporary of the French Revolution. However, its level of economic and social development and the level of consciousness of its masses did not allow the fire of the revolution to ignite a flame of liberation and thus allow Germany to become a people, a nation. Only the avant-garde of the intelligentsia, the leaders of German literature and philosophy, were contemporaries of the great upheaval in a deeper sense, although this is also to be understood with the reservations indicated earlier. From this situation follows an even more acute social and intellectual loneliness of the vanguard than in the past period: the fate of Georg Forster.
True fidelity to the ideas of the great revolution could only produce variations on this tragedy. The greatest, most poignant case is the suffering and downfall of Hoelderlin, whose image lives in German literary history in a completely distorted way. He was misunderstood by his contemporaries, and later historiography misunderstood or even falsified him. Even Hettner showed no deeper understanding for him when he saw his effectiveness as an aftertaste of the Sturm und Drang period. The complete distortion of his image begins with Haym, in whom he appears as a “lateral shoot of Romanticism”, and since then the affiliation of the late and lonely revolutionary Hoelderlin to reactionary Romanticism has been inherited, until even the Nazis claimed him for themselves on the basis of such distortions.
On the other hand, in the thin atmosphere of the classical period, the disadvantages and advantages of German development are even more pronounced than in the Enlightenment. When the German thinkers and poets translated problems of social and political reality into the purely ideal, they distorted and shifted the problem (including questions of a moral character) in the preparatory period for the revolution. Now, when intellectual preparation gave way to deeds, it had to be seen that even the most advanced German intelligentsia was unable to follow the course of the revolution. It failed completely in the great political events. To be sure, there was initially enthusiastic participation; but it was much too abstract, unworldly, socially and politically rootless to be able to follow the course of the revolution, especially its plebeian turn. It is significant how the execution of Louis XVI affects Klopstock, Herder, Schiller and others, and Goethe’s silly comedies against Jacobinism are symbols of genuine German political helplessness.
But it would be an inadmissible simplification of the question if one were to stop here and look at Goethe’s relationship to the French Revolution from the point of view of the “general citizen”. No, alongside the old barriers, which are even more pronounced, the old advantages of thinking through to the end and continuing to shape things have remained alive. However, this is not about the political events of the revolution, but about the social content of the upheaval. Of course, a good deal of German misery is also expressed in this dichotomy with all its bourgeois consequences; but there is also something justified in it: namely the view of Germany as a pre-revolutionary country, still far from a real upheaval, for which the present social problems of the great overthrow are questions of its own, albeit distant, future for which the educated and the people must slowly be prepared.
From this point of view, the consideration of the classic fabrics gives a new and peculiar picture. Wilhelm Meister’s maturity, the end of his errors, is linked to the undertakings of Lothario and his circle, which are expressly based on the, albeit peaceful, elimination of the feudal remnants in agriculture. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that Lothario himself fought on Washington’s side in America against the English oppressors. The Natural Daughter was designed as the first part of a trilogy in which the history of the French Revolution, the corruption and moral dissolution of the “above” should have been presented. Goethe had treated the same subject a few years earlier in Reinecke Fuchs with strongly satirical traits, which, of course, repeatedly turned into a satire of the emerging bourgeois society.
Schiller’s historical work on the Dutch uprising (like Egmont and Don Carlos) and Wilhelm Tell are German images of the future from foreign pasts: images of a revolution that Goethe and Schiller consider necessary and salutary. (The bourgeois traits of German Classicism come to the fore particularly clearly on this theme.) The content of Wallenstein and the Jungfrau von Orleans is formed by the struggles of the peoples for their national unity, for their becoming a nation in general.
In summary, one can say that German Classicism deals almost exclusively with major political and social issues of the day. The only “aesthetic” exceptions to be considered are Goethe’s Achilleis fragment and Schiller’s Bride of Messina, which, however, represents an attempt, admittedly unsuccessful, to form the specific tragedy of the entire period in the most general outlines.
Of course, all the works of this period are extremely objectified in design, lifted into a purely aesthetic sphere with the greatest emphasis and the greatest consciousness. But it is precisely because of this that the material content comes into its own without being spoiled.
The purely aesthetic process in the design and accordingly in the theory puts Goethe and Schiller in contrast to the outstanding representatives of the German Enlightenment. In the great deliberateness of Diderot and Rousseau, whose heir in Germany was, above all, Lessing, there is undoubtedly something that is superior to German Classicism in terms of social pathos, but also in terms of realistic impact. It was precisely under German conditions that the problem of great literature arose. Lessing’s political, philosophical and aesthetic culture was necessary in order to unite the realistic objectivity of the design with the pathos of the enlightening intention: after all, the old Goethe once explained that all contemporary writers are barbarians compared to the culture that Lessing possessed. Already in the young Schiller and even more so in Sturm und Drang, the priority of the intention leads to distorted overall pictures of reality, which are ultimately untrue despite all the authenticity of the realistic individual pictures; in the case of the smaller minds, this resulted in a literature which, in its vagueness, behaved in a demanding manner or breathed a philistine tendency.
The “aesthetic education” by Goethe and Schiller was therefore unavoidable for German literature, for a realistic coping with the problems of a great transitional epoch, especially since its aesthetic imperative, its concept of form was never formalistic, but was based on a deeply intellectual processing of the content. Classicism makes the decisive demand for the “absolute determination of the object”. The classical literature of Germany encountered contradictory material. In ideological and artistic terms, it had in mind the enormous problems of a great age, and its direct subject matter was the petty misery of German life. Goethe and Schiller were aware of the two conditions affecting their work and recognized that this unfavorable nature of the material is initially a specifically German problem, but that its most general, very deepest roots reach down into the essence of modern bourgeois life in general.
That is why the stylistic endeavors of Goethe and Schiller are by no means only of local German importance. The artistic overcoming of the actually German difficulties of the material prepared the first stage of great realism in the nineteenth century. We have already said that as a result of the French Revolution the enlightened realm of reason manifests itself as the realm of the bourgeoisie; the path of progress and humanity presented by the Enlightenment as a straight line turns out to be a tangle of contradictions; the struggle against feudal absolutism turns into a spiritual struggle for understanding within the progressive world of thought itself, for knowledge of where bourgeois society came from and where it is going. The aesthetic-contemplative attitude in the great realism of the first half of the nineteenth century is on the one hand a step backwards compared to the militant pathos of the Enlightenment (which only reappears in Russian realism, combined with the achievements of this period), but on the other hand it enables a deeper penetration into the social phenomena of the new age, into the psychology of the new man, into social reality in general, which was recognized in its historical conditionality.
The changed world situation makes it necessary to pose the formal questions of literature anew. But with such turns, with such sudden enrichment of social content, art is always in danger of losing its form. Goethe’s and Schiller’s unique aesthetic achievement consists precisely in the fact that they absorb the whole richness of the new content and yet master its agility in the form in such a way that the classical purity of the form is preserved and even promises a higher development of the world of form.
The theory of modern literature that Goethe and Schiller worked out is based on a double knowledge, on the knowledge of the wealth and at the same time of the aesthetic danger of the new life. It demands a fight against the artistic disfavor of the material in the name of beauty. That is why classical literary theory focuses on the demand for clarity about the connection and difference between literary genres. Classical genre theory is never formalistic. It arises from Schiller’s requirement of “absolute certainty of the object”. Finding the appropriate genre for a subject means discovering and liberating the soul of the subject itself. In accordance with the general situation of modern literature, the concern of Goethe and Schiller is primarily the careful separation of epic and drama. In this they continue Lessing’s efforts, but also break new ground: after all, Lessing’s genre theory had above all worked out the new literary combat units from the tangle of feudal-absolutist traditions and the consequences of bourgeois weakness in the early days of emancipation.
The clarity about the separation of genres is a higher potency of aesthetic contemplation in the new period. The question posed by Goethe and Schiller contains a dichotomy. Either the system of those artistic laws should be derived from the study of antiquity, with the help of which the artist can express the special character of modern life; the clarity about the genres then serves to discover and build up the forms and formal laws of the modern bourgeois period. Or else a system of general, timeless laws should grow out of the study of antiquity, with the help of which classical art can also be created in the present, despite the anti-artistic problems of contemporary life; in this case it is about overcoming the social and content-related problems of the bourgeois present with the help of the creatively renewed ancient form.
In the artistic practice of the Weimar period we find both aspirations: Wilhelm Meister substantiates the first, Hermann and Dorothea the second. However, Goethe and Schiller, especially Schiller, tended to see the actually artistic path in the second way. Therein lies a specific, essential trait of Weimar Classicism; it shows a certain limitation in the full mastery of the new reality, but it also reveals the relentless struggle to discover and revitalize the old beauty in the new world, and to do so as the soul of the material made free, not as something formalistic carried into it. The struggle for beauty is alive in Goethe even when he takes the first path. This determines his attitude to the preceding and following great realism. In terms of extended totality or a realism that stirs all depths, Wilhelm Meister can be compared neither with Lesage nor Defoe nor with Balzac or Stendhal. But Lesage seems dry, Balzac confused and overloaded compared to the richly moving slenderness of the composition and the character development in Goethe’s novel.
For later generations, the connection between the efforts of Goethe and Schiller and the Enlightenment is clear; but contemporaries understandably felt the contrast to be more important. Therein lies the reason for the open rupture between Goethe and Herder, which was of course preceded by friction. As a result of his enlightened world-view, which did not want to tolerate the dominance of aesthetic principles over morality in design, Herder persuaded Goethe, among other things, not to publish the Roman Elegies and the Venetian Epigrams. When the new principle emerged openly in Goethe’s collaboration with Schiller, Herder clearly expresses his dissatisfaction: “Goethe thinks differently here: the truth of the scenes is everything to him, without having to worry about the little point on the scales that is good, noble, points to moral grace, anxiously distressed.” And later he calls the Goethean ballads The God and the Bayadere, and The Bride of Corinth as “downright glorification of Priapus.”
Here the prerogative of the moral under the petty German conditions turns into a philistinism, which is all the more serious because Herder does not stop at the criticism of individual works by Goethe and Schiller, but at the same time with Schiller’s writings also the problem of new and old in German literature, but – here too a German tragedy becomes visible – with a clear return to the views of the German Enlightenment, which have long since been overcome. It would have been possible to contrast Lessing’s militant culture with the aesthetic aspirations of Goethe and Schiller. But while Herder went back to Gleim and similar authors, the great pioneer for the understanding of historical contradictions ended up as a bourgeois rhetorician of obsolete petty idylls.
Similarly, perhaps even more difficult, is the question posed by the aristocratic trait in the aesthetic culture of Goethe and Schiller. From Schiller’s discussion of Buerger’s works to Jean Paul’s rebellion against the Weimar classics, it creates a contrast that still plays a major role in the later development of German literature. Without question, the strict form of Weimar Classicism means a certain turning away from that tendency towards broad folklore that was alive in Goethe’s and Schiller’s youth, when antiquity, including Homer and Pindar, seemed to be dissolving into a world ethnology, into a generality of folk poetry.
But it is only in their form that Goethe and Schiller turn away from what is immediately popular; they have never created a non-national content. Schiller’s Tell and Jungfrau and his Wallenstein’s Camp show how he strives to build his tragedies on the broad basis of popular movements. This is even clearer in the case of Goethe, whose series of popular female figures begins in youth and in the classical period It goes from Gretchen and Klaerchen to Dorothea and Philine. The human-moral, especially the humanistic superiority of popular figures over those from higher social circles is increasingly expressed.
With all this, of course, the contradiction is not abolished, the problem is not solved. Buerger, Voss and also Jean Paul are undoubtedly more people-oriented writers than Goethe and Schiller. For the development of great literature, however, the crucial question is from which attitude a deeper, more comprehensive, and more truthful overview of the totality of life can be gained.
Jean Paul is the most important opponent of the Weimar aesthetic aristocracy. In the foreword to Quintus Fixlein he also clearly expressed his opinion:
“I could never explore more than three ways to be happier (not happy). The first thing to do is: to penetrate so far above the clouds of life that from afar one sees the whole outer world with its wolf pits, ossuaries and thunder rods lying beneath one’s feet like a shrunken little kindergarten; the second is: to fall straight down into the little garden and nest there so natively in a furrow that when one looks out of his warm lark’s nest one sees no wolf pits, ossuaries and poles, but only ears of corn, each of which is a tree for the nesting bird and a parasol and umbrella. Finally, the third, which I consider to be the most difficult and cleverest, is to switch between the other two.”
Jean Paul’s emotional starting point is certainly more people-oriented than that of the Weimar Classics. Under German conditions, however, this does not result in a more passionate exposure of the great contradictions of modern life, as in Dickens and in the Russian novel, but only in a petty-bourgeois reconciliation with miserable German reality. To justify his second way, Jean Paul poses the rhetorical question: “What should I do to the standing and writing army of loaded state servants, grain clerks, clerks from all departments and all the crayfish placed on top of each other in the crayfish basket of the city office, which have been served with a few nettles for refreshment? What should I show such a way to be saved here?” In politics, Jean Paul was undoubtedly personally more radical than Goethe and Schiller. Under the conditions of German misery, however, the aristocratic, aestheticist attitude of Goethe and Schiller was factually more radical, energetic, and promising than Jean Paul’s popular humor.
This barrier does not lie in Jean Paul’s personality. Klinger differs from Jean Paul in every way; but when, at the end of his Faust, the devil accuses the hero of only caring about the upper classes and disregarding the people, one gets the following contrast to the vices of the upper classes: “If you had knocked on the door, you would have found the man in quiet modesty, magnanimous renunciation, who, unnoticed, exerts more strength of soul and more virtue than your famous heroes in the bloody field and in the treacherous cabinet.” Here, too, it becomes clear that this kind of populism is more regressive than the aesthetic-contemplative recognition of the dialectical movement in society as a whole.
In both cases one recognizes from the similar political-social attitude, albeit with different emotional tones, the harsh one-sided rejection of the big world, as Goethe says in a draft of Faust, and the equally harsh one-sided glorification of the small world. Of course, this glorification contains a dash of good Enlightenment tradition. But in the older Enlightenment there was a revolutionary appeal to the lower, healthy forces of the people (in Germany most strongly in Kabale und Liebe); it was primarily intended to contrast the emerging new human being with the degenerate old society. After the victory of the French Revolution, however, the situation changes precisely in that the new man grows beyond the purely polemical and must become the – very problematic – master of the new reality. The big world thus becomes his own field of activity. This turn in literature only receives its quite appropriate, materially authentic literary expression with Balzac. But Weimar Classicism is not an insignificant prelude to this development. The orientation of Buerger, Klinger, Jean Paul and others towards the people leads, with all good, even sublime intentions, to a lyrical, empathetic or humorous glorification of the petty-bourgeois, philistine German misery.
In this development, however, classical humanism in Germany is more than a mere prelude to the great realism of the first half of the nineteenth century. With his “incommensurable production”, with Faust, the “Iliad of modern life” (Pushkin), Goethe creates a unique peak work of world literature. Although the Faust plan originated in Goethe’s youth, it is certainly no coincidence that the whole of the work only takes on definite forms in this period: it grows beyond the framework of the small world of the Gretchen tragedy into the big world of the subjugation of life by the new man.
This essentially changes, expands and deepens the original Faust plan. Its tragic character is retained, but the nature of the tragic has changed in Goethe. Goethe continues to uphold tragedy as a principle of the individual human being, of the individual stages of development in Faust. The work forms a chain of tragedies, even the last stage of the first act, Faust’s reconciliation with reality as material, object and result of his activity, remains tragic.
However, in the period of completion of Goethe’s world-view, the tragic is no longer an ultimate principle. He is thus in deep agreement with the Enlightenment, in whose future view of Lessing’s “education of the human race” the tragic has no place. (Think of Lessing’s Faust fragment) The Enlightenment does not know tragedy as a principle of life, but only as a means of national pedagogy. With Goethe the interaction between setting and sublating the tragic has become more intimate, more dialectical; only the development of the species, of humanity, advances irresistibly. But the species is realized only in individuals, and the aspirations of individuals are always and everywhere tragic. The untragic element of human development is thus built up from an uninterrupted series of tragedies. The irreconcilable contradictions of human life, of society, of periods are resolved only in the totality of human history.
This plan of Faust appears in the Weimar period; however, decades of experience are still necessary for its completion. That is why the work outstrips Weimar Classicism in content and form, although the ultimate longing and completion of the hero, “to stand on free soil with a free people” is entirely consistent with classical humanism. But in the overall plan of the world poem, Goethe comes closest to the great realism of the period immediately following him. Admittedly only in the overall plan, for outwardly and stylistically no greater contrast can be imagined than that between the last product of the art period and the socially critical realism of France and England.
In Goethe’s last works, there was an important change in classical humanism, which made it possible to approach realism and at the same time showed how attentively Goethe followed the decisive changes in social structure and how correctly he judged them. Classical humanism was based on a knowledge and shaping of the human being in order to promote and defend the versatility of his development, his dignity and inviolability. When Goethe discusses Hamann’s influence on his youthful development in Poetry and Truth, he summarizes what he has taken over as follows: “Everything that man undertakes to achieve, be it through deed or word or otherwise, must come, must arise from the unity of all forces; everything isolated is reprehensible.” In his youth, Goethe created tragic “self-helpers” in the fight for the principle of human inviolability against feudal-absolutistic German misery. At the time of working with Schiller, the fight was already about saving human dignity in the midst of the modern-capitalist division of labor. His educational novel Years of Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister was a utopian one. The Years of Wandering and the second part of Faust already recognize the rule of the capitalist division of labor. But the humanistic struggle for man has only changed its form, not its ultimate goal. That is why what Hegel wrote about his and Schiller’s early works applies to Goethe’s entire life-work: “But the interest and the need for such a real and individual totality and living independence will and can never leave us; we are able to understand the essentiality and development of the states in recognizing the developed civil and political life as still so fruitful and reasonable. In this sense we can admire Schiller’s and Goethe’s poetic youthful spirit in the attempt to regain the lost independence of the figures within the conditions found in modern times.”