Weimar Classicism

• 1. Introduction

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  Weimar Classicism began, in a sense, on a disappointing afternoon in September 1788. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe finally sat down that month with Friedrich Schiller, in the small town of Rudolstadt. Goethe considered Schiller a hothead, still caught up in the raw emotion of the Sturm und Drang movement. Schiller, in turn, found Goethe's calm, classical instincts almost foreign to his own poetic approach. Neither man walked away impressed. Yet within a few years, these two writers built one of German literature's defining movements from a small ducal court most of Europe barely noticed. What turned that stiff introduction into one of literature's great partnerships? And what did a small city in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar offer that persuaded some of Europe's most important writers to move there?

• 2. A Court Assembles Its Poets

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  In 1771, Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, recently widowed, invited the Seyler Theatre Company to her court in Weimar. The troupe, led by Abel Seyler and including the prominent actor Konrad Ekhof, stayed at her court until 1774. Contemporaries called it the best theatre company in Germany during that decade. It also pioneered the Sturm und Drang movement, named for a play Friedrich Maximilian Klinger wrote for the company.

  A year later, Anna Amalia invited Christoph Martin Wieland to Weimar to educate her two sons. Wieland had just published his ironic mirror-for-princes work, Der goldne Spiegel oder die Könige von Scheschian. He soon became an important friend and collaborator, first to Seyler and later to Goethe.

  Goethe himself was called to Weimar in 1775, at age 26, also to tutor the court's princes. By then he already led the Sturm und Drang movement, largely through his epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. After the move, his writing steadily matured, drifting toward an aesthetic ideal closer to classical antiquity. Goethe pursued that ideal geographically too, traveling to Italy in 1786 to train formally in Rome, then widely called Europe's school of art. He failed to become a painter there, but Italy seemed to make him a sharper writer. He returned in the spring of 1788 and freed himself from his earlier court duties.

  Johann Gottfried Herder joined the court as well, arriving after Wieland and Goethe but before Schiller completed the circle. Schiller, the last to arrive, was still known mainly for early, turbulent plays.

• 3. From Rivals To Allies

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  Schiller had built his early reputation on wild, violent, emotion-driven plays before turning toward a more classical style in the late 1780s. In 1794, Schiller and Goethe became friends and allies in a shared project to set new standards for literature and the arts across Germany. Their alliance stood in direct opposition to German Romanticism, a rival movement gaining strength at the same time, particularly hostile to Schiller. Goethe kept up this fight in his essays, including one titled On Dilettantism, criticizing Romantic art and literature repeatedly.

  After Schiller died in 1805, Goethe's continued objections to Romanticism shed light on how his artistic and scientific thinking fit together. Scholars describe Weimar Classicism as an attempt at a binary synthesis, reconciling the vivid feeling of Sturm und Drang with the clear thought of the Enlightenment. That reconciliation, by its own logic, made the movement intrinsically un-Platonic.

  That same tension, between raw feeling and clear thought, traced back decades earlier to a philosophical argument neither Goethe nor Schiller started.

• 4. Roots In Enlightenment Thought

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  Christian Thomasius, born in 1655, and Christian Wolff, born in 1679, built the core philosophy of the German Enlightenment by merging Empiricism and Rationalism. That philosophy spread widely through magazines and journals, and it went on to shape German-speaking and European culture broadly. It could not convincingly bridge feeling and thought, or body and mind, a gap that led to Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, a major turning point in the period's thinking.

  Alexander Baumgarten, born in 1714, offered a less abstract answer, centered on aesthetics, a term he had coined in 1735. In his Aesthetica, published in 1750 with a second volume in 1758, Baumgarten defined aesthetics as the science of the lower faculties. Those faculties, feeling, sensation, imagination, and memory, were exactly what earlier Enlightenment thinkers had neglected. Confusion between his Latin terminology and its German rendering later led many to undervalue what Baumgarten had actually accomplished. His work was not an inquiry into taste, or into what people liked or disliked, but into a genuine way of knowing. That insistence on sensuous knowledge helped spark the Sturm und Drang movement of 1765, in which both Goethe and Schiller took part for a time.

  Goethe and Schiller eventually gave this same friction between feeling and form a private vocabulary of their own, built from three specific terms.

• 5. A Vocabulary For Art

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  Gehalt was the first of three terms Goethe and Schiller relied on, describing an inexpressible felt-thought, or import, alive in both artist and audience. That import only becomes visible through the aesthetic form the artist finds to express it, meaning Gehalt is never separable from form itself. A work's Gehalt, they insisted, could never be reduced to its Inhalt, or plain content.

  Gestalt named the aesthetic form itself, the shape into which a work's import becomes stratified. That shape emerges from regulating rhetorical, grammatical, and intellectual elements, whether abstracted from the world or invented outright by the artist.

  Stoff was the term Schiller and Goethe reserved almost entirely for material drawn from the world, or newly created by the artist. Inside a finished work, this material, sometimes called Inhalt in that context, had to stay indifferent, or gleichgultig, never drawing undue attention to itself. If Stoff pulled focus away from the aesthetic form, the whole balance of the work broke down. It needed such complete unity with Gestalt that pulling it out would destroy the relationships the artist had built.

  This same insistence on form over raw content shaped which writers Schiller chose to print in his own magazine.

• 6. Other Voices In Weimar

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  Die Horen, the periodical Schiller edited between 1795 and 1796, published a serialized novel called Agnes von Lilien. Its author was Caroline von Wolzogen, Schiller's own sister-in-law. Schiller also published work by Sophie Mereau, Friederike Brun, Amalie von Imhoff, Elisa von der Recke, and Louise Brachmann.

  Outside his magazine's pages, Schiller and Goethe were building something even wider, a network of contributors stretching well past literature.

• 7. A Network And Its Legacy

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  Between 1786 and Schiller's death in 1805, he and Goethe recruited a network of writers, philosophers, scholars, and artists to their cause. That network reached even into the natural sciences, including the scientist Alexander von Humboldt. This alliance later became known as Weimar Classicism.

  Schiller stayed remarkably prolific across these years, writing Wallenstein in 1799 and Mary Stuart in 1800. He followed those with The Maid of Orleans in 1801, The Bride of Messina in 1803, and William Tell in 1804. Goethe, meanwhile, produced organic, playful, ironic works like Wilhelm Meister, Faust, and West-ostlicher Divan. Those same qualities could almost earn the movement a second, ironic name, Weimar Romanticism. Goethe always insisted this ironic distance still served a precise aesthetic effect, not looseness for its own sake.

  Alexander von Humboldt's presence in that network pointed toward something larger. This alliance's ideas would go on to help nineteenth-century Germany imagine itself as one culture, and eventually push toward political unification.