Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Historical Drama of the German Baroque: Andreas Gryphius
- 2 The Age of Enlightenment: Aufklärung
- 3 Weimar Classicism: Friedrich Schiller
- 4 Herder, Goethe and the Romantic Tendency: Götz von Berlichingen
- 5 The Emergence of Austria: Franz Grillparzer
- 6 “Non-Austrian” Historical Drama: C. F. Hebbel
- 7 The Modern Age: Schnitzler and Brecht
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Herder, Goethe and the Romantic Tendency: Götz von Berlichingen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Historical Drama of the German Baroque: Andreas Gryphius
- 2 The Age of Enlightenment: Aufklärung
- 3 Weimar Classicism: Friedrich Schiller
- 4 Herder, Goethe and the Romantic Tendency: Götz von Berlichingen
- 5 The Emergence of Austria: Franz Grillparzer
- 6 “Non-Austrian” Historical Drama: C. F. Hebbel
- 7 The Modern Age: Schnitzler and Brecht
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The reader is entitled to ask why, at this point, we are describing a chronological loop: Wallenstein was completed in 1799, Götz in 1774. The answer is: to preserve the appropriate historical order. This latter in turn derives from our basic principle, namely to examine the best examples of the type of play which is, in part at least, informed, in its structure, characterization, and in other ways, by impulses which can be described as historical rather than purely aesthetic. Changes in the way in which history is understood and approached therefore condition its arrangement and it is with Herder, in particular his “Sturm und Drang” treatise Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit that, in opposition to the position of the Enlightenment, a new approach which can be called, in broad-brush terms, “Romantic,” makes itself felt. Short-term, apart from Goethe's play, the literary effects were not perhaps remarkable. Goethe decided that he did not, after all, want to be a new Shakespeare, at least not along the lines sketched out in his and Herder's essays on the English dramatist; Schiller, as we have seen, remained, as an historian, under the influence of the Enlightenment. In the long term, however, we shall be tracing the effects of the 1774 revolution well into the nineteenth century. Not only do Herder and Goethe lay the foundation for the “vaterländisch” (patriotic) play, the whole question of the relation between present, past and future comes to be seen in a new light.
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- Information
- The Historical Experience in German DramaFrom Gryphius to Brecht, pp. 76 - 98Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002