History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
Of all the great periods of literature, the Enlightenment is particularly alien to today’s readers, precisely because the virtues and limitations of German development are shown here more openly than usual. Of course, the contradictory complications of the German path of development already appeared in the Enlightenment. And the modernizing predilection of Hamann, the Sturm und Drang drama, etc., clings to them. But such sympathies also reveal today’s distance from the Enlightenment. The alleged contradiction between those tendencies and the Enlightenment itself is being emphasized more and more, the internal, quite fruitful contradictions of the Enlightenment are being recast into mechanically exclusive contradictions of alien camps. The German literary movement can now be regarded as Enlightenment at most up to Lessing, from there it is something independently “modern”: the revolt of feeling against reason.
There is no question that this construction is fragile and unstable. By diminishing the Enlightenment, the German reaction also wants to get rid of the ideas of 1789 in order to find a conservative counterweight in the irrationalistic Romanticism that began around Hamann. This gives rise to contradictions that are insoluble in literary history. Even the connection between Rousseau and the French Revolution is extremely uncomfortable; As a forerunner of Robespierre he must be a reprehensible Enlightener, as a stimulus of Werther a notable irrationalist. The situation of the falsifiers of history is even more difficult, for example, in the case of Richardson, whose Enlightenment cannot be denied at all.
The anthropological-psychological method does not get us very far in the history of literature. Ages, historical tendencies cannot possibly be characterized by associating them, taken in isolation, with psychic complexes such as feeling and reason. Modern irrationalism turns such complexes into mythical concepts; but this apparent concreteness can only increase the mental confusion.
Admittedly, the antipathy towards reason, especially towards the “enlightened” intellect, among modern reactionaries is quite understandable. For this notorious intellect practiced a ruthless criticism of feudal absolutism and all attempts to justify it. It had the willingness not to adopt the given political form, but to critically destroy it. Modern reactionaries want to denigrate this criticism at all costs, and this is how their empty and false constructions are born.
It is easiest to see through the hollowness and instability of the reason-feeling construction in Lessing. When Lessing criticizes Corneille’s Rodogune, for example, he does not blame the improbable, wonderful and fantastic in this drama (i.e. that which goes beyond reason), but on the contrary treats Corneille as a mere wit, as a mere constructor, to whom he opposes the fullness of feeling of true genius. Lessing fights against Corneille’s inhumanity and callousness for a drama based on genuinely human feelings. Of course, this polemic should not be interpreted as if Lessing were an – inconsistent – forerunner of irrationalism. On the contrary, one must learn to see that Lessing is contrasting the totality of the bourgeois emotional and intellectual world with the totality of the feudal absolutist emotional and intellectual world. (It is not up for discussion here how far Lessing’s critique is correct; only its direction and method should be consulted.)
Such a view does not deny the contradictions within the Enlightenment; on the contrary: the task arises to uncover its true roots. Above all, one must know that the Enlightenment movement was as a whole unified. Where does this unity lie? In the fact that the German citizen gained self-confidence and awoke to the realization that he had to fight feudal absolutism and its ideology. Furthermore, the Enlightenment movement expresses the essence of the emerging bourgeois society, the transformative, revolutionary mission of the new emerging ideology and literature of bourgeois man.
The uniformity of the German Enlightenment and at the same time its deep connection with the French and English Enlighteners – not only with Rousseau, but also with Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu and others – is shown half a century later in retrospect by Goethe in Poetry and Truth. Today’s reader must be struck by how carefully weighed up the succession and separation of the different tendencies and personalities is presented and how lovingly grateful Goethe is for the merits of even insignificant authors that have rightly been forgotten, whose names he highlights.
Contemporaries also felt this uniformity. The letters and memoirs of the Enlightenment reveal a dense tangle, a criss-cross of personal and literary connections. It is noticeable that the relationships are seldom broken off completely, even in the case of the most violent differences of opinion. Merck, the intimate friend of Goethe and Herder, remains connected to Nicolai. With a smile, Wieland ignores all the insults of the Sturm-und-Drang youth in the feeling of inner connection with the literary rebellion; Even the passionate Hamann (“the father of modern irrationalism”), who always railed most violently against the Berlin enlighteners, by no means denied this connection. Hamann warns the heated Jacobi against “sinking into the arms of their orthodox and Zealot opponents” out of hostility towards the Berliners. We can see who Hamann also considers to be the common main enemy. And “orthodox” here is just the religious-ideological adjective to designate the existing feudal-absolutist order in Germany.
Only from here do the real contrasts become apparent. After the Thirty Years’ War, the German bourgeoisie only slowly awoke from the cultural paralysis. However, when, around the middle of the eighteenth century, the movement really began, when the economic and social situation did not provide it with a secure basis, it at least provided the conditions for its development, it advanced at breakneck speed. The unity of the German Enlightenment is determined by the common social basis, by the common enemies – absolutism, nobility, philistinism – and by the common tasks. However, the rapid development brings sudden changes in all questions of strategy and tactics of this battle. The often very sudden turns determine the rapidly changing, complicated groups and battles of direction that can only really be grasped through detailed individual investigations. Here, of course, only the most important problem complexes can be indicated and the personalities or works that are able to illuminate important stages of development can be used.
The awakening of the bourgeoisie in the midst of German misery and its struggle against this misery determined the nature of the German Enlightenment. It is understandable that the beginnings of the Enlightenment were extremely poor, above all cowardly and timid. The feeling of dependence on the petty despotism of the absolute monarchies, the bias in philistinism, from which the ideology of the German Enlightenment laboriously worked itself out, characterize the beginning. With the awakening of courage, with the broadening of the field of vision – which in the beginning could only be abstract and cosmopolitan: in a way that the French and English bourgeoisie had long since made their own – with the groping and developing of the scope of the ideological struggle under the given conditions, once meritorious approaches and achievements become obsolete extremely quickly. What was a big step forward a few years ago will soon become an obstacle to further development. From Gottsched, from his struggles with the Swiss, all directional struggles are to be understood as internal disputes within a camp that was ultimately united. This in no way reduces their sharpness, in fact increases it, but at the same time explains the fact that after two centuries the reader does not perceive many of the differences, which were so hotly disputed at the time, as all that great, sometimes even as infinitesimal, indeed as mere nuances.
The cosmopolitan aspect of the German Enlightenment was due to the general backwardness of Germany. Basically, it is astonishing how quickly Germany’s thinking and poetry took on a life of their own, albeit with constant reference to the ideology of the more developed countries. Above all, it was about liberation from the oppressive, enslaving influence of the courts; the parallel liberation from the philistinism of the bourgeoisie is only the downside. The ideological dependence on feudal absolutism is revealed in philistinism. The struggle of the French with the English influence is only one moment in this process of liberation. For the ideology and art of the French grand siede already appear in the German Versailles caricatures of the small courts in a distorted and degraded form; if they are now translated into the bourgeois, a philistine counterpoint to the aristocratic-courtly poverty must arise. The inclusion of the English literature, regardless of whether it is about Milton, the poet of the Puritan revolution of the seventeenth century, or about the periodicals of the post-revolutionary English bourgeoisie that has become free, is in itself an act of opposition, namely a visible, pronounced, formal and substantive detachment from of the ideology of the German courts. Of course, the appropriation of the great French enlighteners creates a movement in the same direction. It is a favorite trick of modern German chauvinism to impute anti-French sentiment to the great enlighteners. But if Lessing, for example, criticized Corneille and Voltaire, he did so at least as strongly in the name of Diderot as in that of Shakespeare!
This position of the German Enlightenment in relation to its Anglo-French predecessors and contemporaries is contradictory and complicated by Germany’s backwardness. French influences have often promoted obsequious subservience to courtly taste; at the same time, however, the ideological rebellion against ecclesiastical orthodoxy, the pillar of absolutism, was expressed with great sharpness through them. From the England of the Puritan Revolution wafted a very different republican spirit, especially from Milton’s works. However, since under the German conditions the religious form outgrew the revolutionary content, and since rebellious Puritanism turned into pious Pietism, the same contradiction appears here from the other side. Mehring revealed the struggle of these tendencies in Gottsched’s dispute with the Swiss; but the complicated contradiction of such contradictory tendencies runs through the entire German Enlightenment. We shall still find them in Schiller’s The Robbers.
One must, of course, first imagine the liberation from courtly ideology on the most modest scale. Above all, there is an external reason for this: the police pressure of the petty, omnipotent absolutism that interferes in every expression of life. Thus the once famous satirist Rabener complains: “Germany is not the country in which a reforming satire would dare to lift its head with freedom; in Germany I dare not tell a village schoolmaster that truth which a lord archbishop in London must hear.”
An inner timidity corresponds to the external pressure; a hundred years later Heinrich Heine had to scoff at the inner censor that every German philistine carries in their soul. And the same Rabener who so eloquently complains about the external social barriers to satire in Germany sets them up as internal barriers that hinder its development even more: “It is true, there are fools in all classes, but prudence requires not to blame everyone; otherwise I will do more harm through my haste than I can do with my cheapest intentions. I do not even want to think of the audacity of those who, with their outrage, get as far as the prince’s throne and want to hate or ridicule the performance of the superiors. If it is not an inner pride that they believe in their darkest corner to see higher than those who see the whole context before their eyes, it is nevertheless a hasty zeal that cannot be excused in any way.” One sees here that not even the notorious “limited subject understanding” is an independent invention of the Prussian bureaucracy. The timidity at the beginning of the German Enlightenment introduces itself as “limited subservient mind”, and large parts of later German literature never get rid of the stuffy submissiveness.
Of course, one must not forget that this attitude is closely connected with the economic and social situation of German writers. The poverty and pettiness of the German conditions make an independent existence as a writer extremely difficult. For the German writers of this time, as well as for the lower middle-class intelligentsia in general, the subordinate positions in the state bureaucracy form the basis of economic existence. This not only creates an economic dependency, but in the majority of cases also a narrowing of the horizon. And if a certain form of patronage develops over time at individual courts, its “liberating” effects should not be overestimated. Sometimes the best forces are terribly exploited for petty bureaucratic work (Herder in Weimar!), sometimes there is action Where the situation is relatively favourable, there are exceptional cases, and the writers who have tried to express their views relatively freely in spite of being dependent have mostly had to atone for it by long imprisonments in princely prisons (Moser, Schubart, etc.).
Last but not least, what is fascinating about Lessing’s appearance is his fight against the German poverty in everyday life, also in questions of the existence of a writer. Klopstock is the first poet in Germany for whom the national task of literature reflected on the personal dignity of the writer, who also in life lifted the type of German writer out of bureaucratic subalternity, and its antithesis, declassed vagabondism. But Lessing was the first to wage a real struggle for the social and national mission of the independent writer. Under the conditions of the Germany of that time, he was bound to fail. Even to the most successful dramatist, the most brilliant and prolific critic and publicist of the whole period, this path was not open. But the struggle as such remains exemplary, even if it finds little worthy succession in later German literature.
But the scope of the German Enlightenment is restricted not only from the outside, but also from within. It is limited to the purely ideological, to literature and literary theory, at most to philosophy and theology, and this at a time when, above all in France, the great preparatory work for the coming revolution is taking place. However, one must not forget one thing: the leading German Enlighteners, above all Lessing, always knew that their entire literary work formed part of this liberation struggle. But the displacement of culture from the immediate social sphere is not just a missing note in the symphony, it rather affects everything else, changes the subject and tone, form and horizon even where there seems to be no connection with actual social tasks.
Of course, a great, militant literature is already an act in itself, also in the social sense. And Emilia Galotti and Nathan, Götz and Werther, The Robbers, Kabale und Liebe and Don Carlos are undoubtedly deeds. But there is also a turning of theory into practice, as can be observed with Defoe or Voltaire. And the fact that such a turning in Germany was in principle impossible or at least hopeless from the outset and doomed to failure inevitably colored the whole production of the German Enlightenment. It is not by chance that two political tragedies stand at the end of the German Enlightenment: those of Goethe and Forster. In Weimar, Goethe failed in his attempt to implement the ideas of the Enlightenment in the political and social life of this miniature state, then fled to Italy and finally to the world of pure contemplation. Georg Forster, the only practical revolutionary among the German intelligentsia of that time, the artist and scientist who led the short-lived, Jacobin-inspired Republic of Mainz in 1793, was driven out of Germany and met his lonely death in exile in Paris. This limit must be pointed out because the main representatives of the German Enlightenment were real contemporaries, intellectually and artistically, of the great preparatory period of the French Revolution, indeed sometimes (intellectually and artistically) went beyond their French and English models. The demonstration of the contradiction in the above-described distance from reality is therefore unavoidable here. Otherwise the tremendous tension inherent in the German Enlightenment would remain incomprehensible. The ideologues of the German Enlightenment, who assume similar (albeit more backward) social conditions to those of the French and English, took part in the intellectual and artistic development of the preparatory phase of the French Revolution.
Admittedly, in the clouds, as it were, in the realm of pure thought and poetry, separated from political and social practice. This leads to tragic disappointments, as in the case of Goethe or Forster, and to bourgeois narrow-mindedness, to cowardice, narrowness, eccentricity or complacency in the works of even the greatest and most honest talents. Occasionally, however, it is possible, for brilliant poets or thinkers, to take advantage of the lack of resistance in the socially airless ideological space in order to go beyond the more advanced models in thinking to the end or in developing further. Winckelmann does this in his interpretation of antiquity by detaching the understanding of this epoch in a democratic-revolutionary manner from the courtly-noble conventions of the Baroque and Rococo. Lessing achieves this in the justification of the genre theory, above all in the drama. This is what the German bourgeois drama achieves, which in Emilia Galotti and Kabale und Liebe went far beyond what even Diderot (not to speak of the English beginnings) was able to create. This is achieved in Werther. Just compare the inner life of the new bourgeois man in this book with Richardson and Rousseau.
We see the other side of the coin in the blurred pietistic subjectivity of the “Messiah”, which dissolves every contour, in which the entire revolutionary force and creative power of the English model has disappeared, but above all in the drama of the Sturm und Drang: as the creator of individual scenes, it stands honorably ahead of its best contemporaries, but its dramas as a whole are always built on an excited-philistine, demanding-senseless quirk. The German literature of the Enlightenment does not just want to mentally prepare a political-social upheaval, it vibrates, it digs up the most hidden developmental tendencies of the epoch and brings them to light; in this way it finally becomes the forerunner of the problematic of that reality which only dominated Europe after the revolution. Anyone who does not bring forth this genius of anticipatory foresight almost always sinks far below the Western European level: if he is predominantly subjective and lyrical, then everything becomes blurred in the fog of the social formlessness of German life; if he is a normal, albeit highly gifted, realist, his work as a whole is distorted and crushed by this same crudeness. The average type of enlightener, harmonious both inwardly and outwardly, which is so widespread in France and England, is one of the greatest rarities in Germany. Of the leading figures, only Wieland approaches it; Gellert may at best be regarded as a narrow, petty-bourgeois variant of the type. Of course, one cannot mechanically separate the ingenious development from the sinking back into the confusion of the German misery. In the dramas of the young Schiller, in the works of Hamann and Herder (to name only the greatest) we see both side by side or mixed together.
What is the continuation now? With Emilia Galotti and Intrigue and Love, the answer is relatively simple. In these dramas the highest tragic possibilities are reached, which result from the clashes of the second and third estates. (It is certainly no coincidence that Beaumarchais’ Figaro, the French pinnacle work, draws the highest satirical-comic possibilities from the same material.)
Goethe’s Werther, the first German world success (if one disregards Winckelmann), raises more complicated questions. The new human being discovered by the English and Rousseau and his emotional world is more perfect, more varied and deeper, at the same time more individual and more typical than in their best works. But beyond that, Werther, naturally only in a vague and indicative manner, already brings pictures of the inner contradictions of bourgeois society, above all in the area of individual morality, of contradictions that are not even found in France, let alone dominate the content and form of life in Germany.
This brings us to the crucial characteristic of the German Enlightenment. It suspects the fundamentally contradictory character of life and, in close connection with this, struggles to understand the historical conditionality of every existence. Of course, one must be careful not to juxtapose these late-period efforts with the general, earlier Enlightenment tendencies. The view that the entire Enlightenment was unhistorical, even anti-historical, is a reactionary legend. German reactionary ideology in particular has long attempted to prove that historical meaning arose out of the counter-revolutionary criticism of the French Revolution. This is intended on the one hand to do away with the historical conception of the Enlightenment itself, and on the other hand to push the historical defense of progress in the first half of the nineteenth century (Hegel, French historians of the Restoration period) into the background. The heyday of the Enlightenment not only produced important historians (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, etc.), but also further developed the method of historical research and thus the historical sense. It suffices to refer to the effect of this method, to the great historical deed of Winckelmann.
So when we speak of a new, specifically historical sense in the final phase of the German Enlightenment, we take it for granted that this tendency unfolded on the basis of previous historical research of the Enlightenment. In this regard, Herder is not only a follower of Montesquieu and others, but his historical research into oriental and Greek antiquity is also based on preliminary work by English enlighteners. (To what extent Vico’s indirect, subterranean influence was at work here has not yet been revealed.)
It is the same with the origin of the dialectical conception of being. Here, too, no harsh contrast should be constructed between the late period of the German Enlightenment and its Anglo-French predecessors. To be sure, the epistemology of the materialistic enlighteners is undialectical, even antidialectical. However, the practice of their individual research or individual designs produces downright masterpieces of dialectics (e.g. Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot) and the historical and social-philosophical works of Rousseau are already largely based on a dialectical view of history. However, these tendencies do not form the theoretical main line of the French Enlightenment. What there was only an episode (albeit a highly significant one) for the Enlightenment in France, becomes a fundamental problem for the last phase of the Enlightenment in Germany, leading to the further development and at the same time to the dissolution of the ideology of the German Enlightenment.
The special situation of the German Enlightenment has many reasons. In addition to the idealistic trend of the time discussed earlier, the greater need for historical orientation in cultural tasks and goals plays an important role. Precisely because German history is so abrupt and fraught with problems, because one was at an unprecedented low point economically, politically and socially, while on the one hand the German people had experienced times of glory in the distant past, and on the other hand the leaders of the German Enlightenment regarded themselves ideologically as equal contemporaries of their French and English comrades-in-arms, the attempts to understand the fate and path of the German people, of German culture, led deep into the investigation of history and the problem of historicity in general, and of the contradictions in particular in the historical process and especially in the breakthrough of progressive aspirations.
Admittedly, these questions could not really be solved with the thinking methods of the German Enlightenment at the time. Attempts to go beyond the previous Enlightenment philosophy in the direction of a merely suspected historical dialectic led almost everywhere to a back and forth between ideas that ingeniously anticipate the future and relapse into a gloomy reaction. Hamann and Herder are the best examples of this; the young Goethe is closely related to their promising intentions, but for the most part rejects the reactionary vibes with healthy instinct. Hamann and Herder sometimes give magnificent pictures of the historical development of the human race, of history growing out of the inner agitation of the forces of nature; they often show deep insights into the origins of language and poetry; they develop correct insights into the essence of folk poetry and its connection with the greatest works of poetry, with Homer and Shakespeare; Herder even comes close to an understanding of the Old Testament from Near Eastern folklore. Such significant achievements in history and its methodology change with time to sudden relapses into a fairly average or even demanding belief in revelation, often with an unclear, even mystically formulated “philosophy of life”. Reactionary thinking prevails among their temporary or permanent ideological allies (Jacobi, Lavater, etc.).
This back and forth between the extreme poles of promising progress and a philosophical step backwards is deeply rooted in the social and ideological situation of Germany at the time. It was precisely in Germany that it was most difficult to find a theoretical basis for trust in the reformatory role of “enlightened absolutism”, although (or because) the bow to ordinary, unenlightened absolutism dominated social life. And the experiences with the Prussia of Frederick the Second – this must be emphasized because of the well-known reactionary falsification of history – by no means worked in such a way that they could have aroused such trust; quite the contrary: Winckelmann and Klopstock, Lessing and Herder, Goethe and the young Hegel are at one in the passionate or ironic-superior rejection of the lack of culture and the anti-national attitude in the regime of the “great king”. In this way, there was a tendency to glorify pre-absolutist Germany as an age of freedom. If this view had been combined with the recognition that the defeat of the Peasant War was Germany’s great historical catastrophe, the criticism of absolutism could have led to a clearly progressive view of German history and its contradictions. However, the German enlighteners were far from such a realization. (It was not until the forties of the nineteenth century that this realization dawned on Alexander von Humboldt.)
With Justus Moeser, with Herder, with the young Goethe, there is only a lively but very vague instinct that one must go back to the point at which Germany’s historical and cultural catastrophe began. But they still do not succeed in even guessing at the true connection. That is why their criticism contains much that is correct and progressive against absolutism and its bureaucracy, but it is often based on a false, on a reactionary basis, which is particularly evident in the case of Justus Moeser, who sometimes even tries to defend serfdom “historically”. Such efforts then had a disastrous effect on German ideology up to the policy of Baron vom Stein during the reform period, who essentially put a Moeser train of thought into practice.
Despite all his indecisiveness in criticizing the reaction, it should not be overlooked that Justus Moeser does not appear everywhere and always as a reactionary, but rather has a healthy instinct to defend the emerging national culture; just think of his violent rebellion against Frederick II’s book on German literature. The confusion, the juxtaposition of reactionary and progressive ideas can be observed in all the important figures of this period, with the exception of Lessing, whose sensitivity to progress was unfailing. Klopstock’s attempt to base German poetry on old German mythology, on the oldest traditions of German history, is a striking example of this confusion, in which, of course, the historically backward, sterile ideas predominate.
All of these contradictions are concentrated in Goethe’s brilliant first work, Goetz von Berlichingen. No detailed analysis is required to see that the conception of the drama is influenced by Moeser’s conception of the law of Faust as a “period of freedom”; It is also easy to see today that Goethe failed to recognize the reactionary core of the aristocratic revolt any more than he did the progressive core of the peasant revolution. In the case of the greatest poet of the time, however, we experience a “victory of realism”. Despite the historically fundamentally wrong conception of his hero, Goethe endowed him with historically and individually correct traits, and his poetic criticism of the poverty and depravity of the small state that was emerging at the time. Absolutism, the corruption of knights to court nobility, etc., is of great historical truth. It is therefore no coincidence that despite all the problems of Goetz as a drama for European literature, the real shaping of history begins here; because the world-literary justification of historical poetry in Walter Scott is directly related to this drama.
For better or for worse, the inner contradictions of the time were promoted by the ideological situation of the German Enlightenment. Despite certain sympathies with materialism, which are at work in Lessing’s, Goethe’s and at times Herder’s leanings towards Spinoza, the most radical, advanced philosophy of the Enlightenment is gaining no ground in Germany. This is not just a consequence of economic backwardness. The fact that the aristocratic, courtly variety of French Enlightenment philosophy, including materialism, received a certain amount of support in Germany’s feudal absolutism, particularly in the Prussian reign of Frederick II, also played a not unimportant role. The courtly manifestation of philosophical materialism is, of course, a distortion; in the process it loses his revolutionary, upheaval nature and takes on an aristocratic-cynical streak. The more fiercely and passionately the German Enlighteners fight against the ideology of the courts, the more they find this aristocratic-cynical world view hostile, and they are unable to distinguish French and English democratic originals from their German courtly caricatures. The hatred of the self-confident new bourgeois people of Germany for the moral cynicism of the nobility and the courts explodes in the caricature of Franz Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers, drawn with raging fury.
Thus the ideological struggles of the late German Enlightenment lost all direction. Neither Leibniz and Wolff’s philosophy nor English sensualism can pave the way for the Enlighteners to solve the deep and progressive problems they have raised. In his youth, Goethe saved himself from reactionary lapses only by rejecting every philosophical system; only with the emergence of classical German philosophy, with its incipient turn towards objective idealism, did he consciously strive for philosophical clarification. That is why all approaches to a historical and dialectical world view at the end of the German Enlightenment are so spontaneous, so merely foreboding, so unclear and so vacillating. So the crowning conclusion of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, finds a feverish ferment, a dissolution, a crisis in Germany, while in France the great founders and expanders of the philosophy of the Enlightenment are no longer alive, but their ideas are inspired by powerful popular movements, demonstrating contradictions in practice, putting them into action. Although the French Revolution was generally enthusiastically welcomed by the German Enlightenment, it is not surprising that the insufficiently well-founded enthusiasm could not withstand the revolutionary events, and that the very climax of the revolution caused disappointment, a turning away. But we also have to see the other side. When the “realm of reason” of the Enlightenment ideology rose out of the revolution as a bourgeois society with its inner contradictions, the first attempt to grasp the contradictory nature of the new phenomenon was made – and this is no coincidence – in German poetry and philosophy.