STURM UND DRANG. — Literary movement of German youth around 1770–80, so called after a drama by Klinger (1776). It drew its impetus from English pre-Romanticism (Shaftesbury, Young, Macpherson, Percy), from the national idea that developed in Switzerland (Muralt, Bodmer), and from Rousseau’s and Klopstock’s critique of civilization.
It replaced the one-sided Enlightenment cult of raison with the doctrine of all the united forces of man; the feudal and absolutist state with the humanitarian-national ideal and political-economic freedom; the poetic norms of French classicism and the theory of imitation with the free language of the feelings and the cult of the “original genius,” though it often exaggerated this, stylistically as well, to the point of an unrestrained subjectivism.
The “loose sheets” Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773; authors: Herder, Goethe, Frisi, Möser) have an almost programmatic significance. Following Hamann’s lead (“Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race”), Herder discovered aesthetic values in the folk songs of all nations (Volkslieder, 1778–79), and especially in the “natural poetry” of Homer, Pindar, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Ossian. The principal poetic symbols of the Stürmer are the “titanic” Prometheus, rebellious against the gods (Shaftesbury: dramatic fragment and Goethe’s hymn), and the “superman” Faust, confined within the narrow limits of humanity (Weidmann, Maler Müller, Lenz, Klinger; Goethe, Urfaust, c. 1771–75). The Stürmer cultivated drama above all (first attempt: V. HERZOGENBURG, Ugolino, 1768); preferred themes were hatred between brothers (Leisewitz, Julius von Tarent, 1776; Klinger, Die Zustiologie, 1776; Schiller, Die Räuber, 1781), infanticide (H. L. Wagner, Die Kindermörderin, 1776; Goethe, Faust I), and, almost always and everywhere, accusation or satire directed against backward society (Lenz, Der Hofmeister, 1774; Die Soldaten, 1776; Schiller, Kabale und Liebe, 1784). National history furnished the subjects for numerous “leader dramas,” realized according to Shakespeare’s stagecraft (Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen, 1771–73). The lyric poetry of the Stürmer, supported by the literary group of the Hain (“grove”; symbol of Germanic poetry, taken from an ode by Klopstock) in Göttingen, reached its culmination in Goethe’s pantheistic youthful hymns in “free rhythms” and in the Anthologie of the young Schiller (1782), while Bürger created the German art ballad (Lenore, 1773). The idyll no longer had an Arcadian but a realistic tone (Voss, Der siebzigste Geburtstag, 1780). The novel of the period too, from Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1773) to Heinse’s Ardinghello (1787), bears the imprint of S. und D.