STURM UND DRANG. – A literary movement of German youth around 1770–80, so named from a drama by Klinger (1776). It takes its inspiration from English preromanticism (Shaftesbury, Young, Macpherson, Percy), from the national idea developed in Switzerland (Muralt, Bodmer), and from Rousseau’s and Klopstock’s critique of civilization.
It replaces the one-sided Enlightenment cult of *raison* with the doctrine of all the united forces of man; the feudal and absolute 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 feeling and the cult of the “original genius,” though often exaggerating this even stylistically into unrestrained subjectivism.
Almost programmatic in value are the pamphlets *Von deutscher Art und Kunst* (1773; authors: Herder, Goethe, Frisi, Möser). Following in Hamann’s footsteps (“Poetry is the mother tongue of mankind”), Herder discovers aesthetic values in the folk songs of all nations (*Volkslieder*, 1778–79) and particularly in the “natural poetry” of Homer, Pindar, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Ossian. The principal poetic symbols of the *Stürmer* are the “titanic” Prometheus, rebelling against the gods (Shaftesbury: dramatic fragment and Goethe’s hymn), and the “superman” Faust, confined within human limitations (Weidmann, Maler Müller, Lenz, Klinger; Goethe, *Urfaust*, c. 1771–75). The *Stürmer* cultivate above all drama (first attempt: V. HERZOGENBURG, *Ugolino*, 1768); preferred themes: fratricidal hatred (Leisewitz, *Julius von Tarent*, 1776; Klinger, *Die Zwillinge*, 1776; Schiller, *Die Räuber*, 1781), infanticide (H. L. Wagner, *Die Kindermörderin*, 1776; Goethe, *Faust* I), and, almost everywhere and always, accusation or satire against backward society (Lenz, *Der Hofmeister*, 1774; *Die Soldaten*, 1776; Schiller, *Kabale und Liebe*, 1784). National history provides subjects for numerous “leader dramas” executed in Shakespearean stagecraft (Goethe, *Götz von Berlichingen*, 1771–73). The lyric poetry of the *Stürmer*, supported by the literary circle of the Hain (“grove”; symbol of Germanic poetry, drawn from a Klopstock ode) in Göttingen, culminates in Goethe’s pantheistic youthful hymns in “free rhythms” and in Schiller’s *Anthologie* (1782), while Bürger creates the German art ballad (*Lenore*, 1773). The idyll no longer has an Arcadian tone but a realistic one (Voss, *Der siebzigste Geburtstag*, 1780). Even the novel of the period, from Goethe’s *Die Leiden des jungen Werthers* (1773) to Heinse’s *Andinghello* (1787), bears the imprint of *Sturm und Drang*.