Sturm und Drang

STURM UND DRANG. - A literary movement of German youth around 1770-80, so named after a drama by Klinger (1776). It takes its cue from English pre-Romanticism (Shaftesbury, Young, Macpherson, Percy), from the national idea that developed in Switzerland (Muralt, Bodmer), and from the criticism of civilization by Rousseau and Klopstock.

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 the feelings and the cult of the "original genius," though often exaggerating this, even stylistically, into unbridled subjectivism.

The "flysheets" Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773; authors: Herder, Goethe, Frisi, Möser) have an almost programmatic value. Following in the footsteps of Hamann ("Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race"), 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, rebel against the gods (Shaftesbury: dramatic fragment and hymn by Goethe), and the "superman" Faust, confined within narrow human limits (Weidmann, Maler Müller, Lenz, Klinger; Goethe, Urfaust, ca. 1771-75). The Stürmer cultivate above all the drama (first attempt: v. Gerstenberg, Ugolino, 1768); preferred themes: 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, the accusation or satire against a backward society (Lenz, Der Hofmeister, 1774; Die Soldaten, 1776; Schiller, Kabale und Liebe, 1784). National history supplies the subjects for numerous "dramas of condottieri" realized according to Shakespeare's stage technique (Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen, 1771-73). The lyric poetry of the Stürmer, flanked by the literary group of the Hain ("grove"; symbol of Germanic poetry, derived from an ode by Klopstock) of Göttingen, culminates in the pantheistic youthful hymns of Goethe in "free rhythms" and in the Anthologie of the young Schiller (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 Ardinghello (1787), bears the imprint of the S. und D.

Horst Rüdiger