Lecture 6b: German Aesthetic Theory as a Reaction to the French Revolution

• The Impact of the French Revolution on German Authors

• Mainzer Freiheitsschriften

• The German States Are Not ‘Fit’ for the Revolution

• What One Might Call the ‘Weimar (and Jena) Experiment’

• Sansculott and ‘Restored’ Nobleman and other counter-images

• Schiller’s Analytical Terminology

• Schiller’s Life

The Impact of the French Revolution on German Authors

2 modes of (literary) reactions

• German Jacobin Literature

• Georg Forster’s travel accounts

• Joachim Heinrich Campe, Joh. Jos. von Görres, J.A.G.F. Rebmann, Adolph Frhr. von Knigge

• sympathy and the idea of some transformation for bringing it to Germany

• Hölderlin, Klopstock, Wil-helm von Humboldt, Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, Schelling

• Freemasonic lodges

Herder speaks of the French Revolution as the ‘most important event’ in Europe since the introduction of Christianity and the Reformation. (Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität)

Mainzer Freiheitsschriften: 1792-93 Mainz Became a Republic

The German States Are Not ‘Fit’ for the Revolution ”Unlike more radical Jacobins, Knigge hoped for the gradual emancipation of that middle-class element in German society which was not in a revolutionary mood.

In France a complex power structure had in 1789 been successfully challenged by the uprising of a heterogeneous bourgeoisie who commanded a measure of landed property and an effective role in the established bureaucracy.

In the German states this class was not strong enough to marshall revolutionary sentiments;

its economic condition was almost fatally weakened by the prevailing system of customs barriers between hundreds of sovereign territories that prevented the development of an internal German market.

The German middle class depended for its welfare almost totally on the landed aristocracy and

eagerly cultivated the advantages of belonging to a princely bureaucracy.”

(Victor Lange, The Classical Age of German Literature. 1740-1815, p. 133.)

What One Might Call the ‘Weimar (and Jena) Experiment’

Goethe’s point of view

“Averse to radicalism in any form, he feared the impact of the Revolution (...) upon an ill-prepared German society.

But what concerned him most was the threat he saw coming from France to the existing system of small states, a system that seemed to him not only to offer resistance to Prussian and Austrian dominance but to provide more adequate scope for the gradual release of middle-class energies.

He recognized that unlike France and England, where a high literary culture had been achieved within a national framework of political and economic power, any contribution to world literature was in Germany bound to be made by the small and politically interdependent ‘Kleinstaaten’.

In Weimar, well staffed public institutions would ensure the involvement and training of a broad group of citizens, through the kind of educaton designed to create not merely technical competence but an understanding of the contemporary world and its ever more scientific and technological character.”

(Victor Lange, The Classical Age of German Literature. 1740-1815, p. 133.)

Sansculotte and ‘Restored’ Nobleman

Tallerand, 1815

Opening of the Assembly of the Generalstände, 1789

Robespierre’s Terror, 1794

Kenotaph for Newton - imaging the new architecture

Voltair’s Triumph, 11 July 1791:

2nd burial and festival for the masses

Terror, Uproar, Violence• violent clashes within the streets of Paris• Christian Churches abolished, their property withdrawn• in war with feudal Europe• burning and tearing down of the Bastille and the palaces• famine and mass rallies of the poor

Reason, Order, Dictatorship• proclamation of a democratic constitution• Reason as new religion: Kult des Höchsten Wesens• building the people‘s army • a radically modern architec-ture: ideal of the straight line• power sharing institutions run by the bourgeois classes

sensuous drive / Stofftrieb form drive / Formtrieb

Schiller’s analytical terminology

The contradictions of the French Revolution are to be taken as the signature of modernity:

where Stofftrieb and Formtrieb clash, people need to develop as a third evolutionary means the Spieltrieb to recreate the unity of both on a higher level of culture

Schiller’s Life: From Early Days at Stuttgart and Mannheim to the Classicist Period at Jena and Weimar