Movements and schools
German Classicism
The surge, then the balance, of German letters around Weimar.
In 1774 a young man shoots himself for love in a novel of letters, and all Europe dresses like him. Twenty years later the same Goethe and his friend Schiller, settled at the small court of Weimar, sought the opposite: measure, Greek form, the education of mankind through beauty. Between the two lies the revolt of the Sturm und Drang, Schiller's robbers on the stage, Hölderlin's Hyperion. Lessing had added, with Nathan the Wise, a plea for tolerance between Jews, Christians and Muslims.
works 7
- PoetryThe MessiahDer MessiasFriedrich Gottlieb Klopstock · 1748A Christian epic begun by a twenty-four-year-old poet, in which the ancient hexameter enters German poetry for the first time.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelThe Sorrows of Young WertherDie Leiden des jungen WerthersJohann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774An eighteenth-century epistolary novel in which a young man tells a friend, month after month, of a love that has nowhere to go.Literature
- TheatreNathan the WiseNathan der WeiseGotthold Ephraim Lessing · 1779A verse play of the German Enlightenment, in which a Jewish merchant, a sultan and a Templar meet in a Jerusalem of the Crusades.Literature
- PoetryOberonChristoph Martin Wieland · 1780An epic poem in the manner of chivalric romances, in which a knight sets out for the East with the help of the king of the elves.LiteraturePublic domain
- TheatreThe RobbersDie RäuberFriedrich von Schiller · 1781A Sturm und Drang play, the first work of a twenty-one-year-old author, in which a count's disinherited elder son takes to the outlaw life against the established order.Literature
- NovelHyperionFriedrich Hölderlin · 1797An epistolary novel of the late eighteenth century, in which a young Greek writes of his education, his friendships, his love and his commitment to an insurrection.LiteraturePublic domain