THE TITLE OF GOETHE'S EPIC HERMANN UND DOROTHEA indicates that the story concerns two main characters or protagonists. The bulk of scholarship on Hermann und Dorothea has been concerned with determining the meanings of these two characters, what each “stands for” as encodings of two socio-political alternatives and milieu. Though Hermann's name evokes the militant defender of Germania against the imperial oppressors, the Hermann who defeated the Roman general Varus in the battle of Teutoburger Forest in 9 A.D. (the Prince of the Cherusker is represented as the protagonist of Kleist's Hermannsschlacht), he comes across in Goethe's characterization as rather the immature, mild-mannered provincial bourgeois son. Dorothea, on the other hand, whose function within the character-system is quite complex, as we will see, displays a heroic temperament and worldliness linked to her experience as a refugee of the French Revolution, which undergo a process of domesticization over the course of the narrative.

Goethe's epic tells the story of their marriage, and likewise suggests a commentary on two political options of the time and their potential resolution. In a letter to Herzogin Louise, Goethe describes his epic poem as the representation of the two main “dispositions” separating the contemporary world: “Das Ganze schien mir zu fordern daß die zwei Gesinnungen in die sich jetzt beinahe die ganze Welt teilt neben einander und zwar auf die Weise wie es geschehen ist dargestellt würden” (13 June 1797). These two political “attitudes,” however, can be said to describe a fissure within late eighteenth-century bourgeois ideology, two character traits, if you will, of a conflicted enlightenment humanism.