German Literature and History Summary

Sturm und Drang

  • Movement promoted by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
  • Emphasized nature, feeling, genius, and individualism against Enlightenment rationalism.
  • Key works:
    • "Willkommen und Abschied" (1775), set to music by Franz Schubert.
    • The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
  • Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was also a key figure.
    • The Robbers (1781) and On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794).
    • "An die Freude" (Ode to Joy, 1785), used in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1824).

Classicism

  • Focused on antiquity.
  • Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) influenced Goethe and Schiller.
    • Wrote Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) and The History of Art in Antiquity (1764).

Romanticism

  • Period: late 18th to mid-19th century.
  • Characteristics:
    • Value of beauty over reason.
    • Focus on the self.
    • Use of mythology.
    • Interest in the genius.
    • Emphasis on moods and emotion.
    • Exploration of transcendent experience and spiritual truth.
    • Interest in folk culture and ethnic origins.
    • Interest in the Middle Ages.
    • Interest in the exotic and mysterious.
  • Key figure: Caspar David Friedrich.
  • Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843): Hälfte des Lebens (1804).
  • Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).

Cultural Figures and Works

  • Grimm Brothers: Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859).
    • Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Home Fairy Tales) (1812-1858).
    • Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) (1838-1961).
  • Heinrich Heine (1797-1856).
  • Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) and Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) (1805-1847).
  • Käthe Kollwitz: The Weavers' Uprising (1897/98).
  • Richard Wagner (1813-1883).
    • Total art work (Gesamtkunstwerk).
    • The Ring of the Nibelung.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
    • Philosopher and Philologist.
    • Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
    • On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).

Historical Context

  • Napoleonic Wars (1803-1813) and Wars of Liberation (1813-1815).
  • Congress of Vienna (1815): Restoration of aristocracy and rollback of individual rights.
  • Wartburg Fest (1817): Book burning.
  • The German Federation (Deutscher Bund, 1815-1866).
  • Failed Revolution of 1848/49.
  • Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895): The Communist Manifesto (1848).
    • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831): Dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis).
  • Proclamation of the German Empire (1871).
    • Otto von Bismarck, Prime Minister of Prussia, key in German unification.
  • Berlin Conference of 1884-1885: European claims in Africa.
  • Genocide in German South-West Africa / Namibia (1904-1907) and Maji-Maji War in German East Africa / Tanzania (1905-1907).
  • First World War (1914-1918).
  • Peace Treaty of Versailles (1919).

Social Aspects

  • Early 19th-Century Salons: Rahel Levin-Varnhagen.
  • Abolition of discrimination based on religious confession in Prussia (1869).
  • German Jewish soldiers observing Yom Kippur during Franco-Prussian War (1870/71).