The Literature of Weimar Classicism (review)

In his opening sentence, Simon Richter immediately formulates the essential framework that this book addresses for the next 370 pages: "If literary historians agree on anything, it is that Weimar Classicism as a distinct period ought not to exist." In the following twelve contributions, all of high quality, and often as eloquent as Richter's introduction, his initial verdict is all too often supported, to an extent that one feels compelled to question Camden House's decision to separate Goethe and Schiller from Volume 6, Literature of Sturm and Drang, and Volume 8, respectively, The Literature of German Romanticism and group them as "classicist." It is as if the editor had to follow the publisher's outdated mode of a traditional literary history, and did his very best to frame and legitimize "GoetheandSchiller" once again as a single and exclusive entity for which the aesthetic term of "Weimar Classicism" had to serve.

Listen to the various attempts of classifying the term "Weimar Classicism" that almost every contributor had to ponder, including Richter's own: "Weimar Classicism is understood as explicitly offering an aesthetic solution to troubled times" (5), despite the fact that its characteristics "are perfectly consistent with those of European Romanticism" (3). Dieter Borchmeyer's recycled and revised essay "Gibt es 'deutsche Klassiker'?" (1998) justly reminds us that "epochs and periods are heuristic and consensus-based attempts at bringing order to literary and cultural production" but only so that "participants delude themselves into believing their period can be defined" (47). He then concludes that "it has become clear that it is not possible to speak of classicism around 1800 in the full semantic breadth of the concept" (60). Thomas P. Saine, who portrays Herder as being "not a deep thinker" (119) even though he is the only male author in the orbit of Goethe and Schiller deemed sufficiently worthy to have a separate essay devoted to him, leaves his own sardonic judgment unanswered when he asserts that "the question why Herder should be regarded as Classical or as a Classic is not really much different than posing the same question in the case of Goethe, Schiller, and assorted lesser figures of the period" (117). Jane K. Brown seems to have an easier assignment when surveying the "Drama and Theatrical Practice in Weimar Classicism," since "for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the dramas of 'GoetheandSchiller' stood for Weimar Classicism" (133). While her focus on theatrical practice has to undermine to some extent the popularity of the two "professional" friends (Gail Hart) and their enterprise to "educate the German public [ . . . ] through the theater" (133) she declares when addressing Schiller's late plays: "It is crucial to recognize that the full flowering of Weimar Classicism was in fact a Romantic drama" (161). Cyrus Hamlin in his essay on "German Classical Poetry" not only focuses mainly on Hölderlin's elegy "Brod und Wein," but goes as far as to state that "I do not accept the concept of Classicism as a distinct period in German literary history" (195). Even Elisabeth Krimmer's analysis of five novels by women authors (Caroline von Wolzogen, Friederike Unger, Sophie Mereau, Johanna Schopenhauer, and Charlotte von Stein) has to admit vaguely: "The works discussed in this article are chosen primarily for their stylistic and ideological proximity to German Classicism" (238) before she provides an excellently conceptualized theoretical framework for the novels by stressing how the elements of "body bildung" are "set up as irreconcilable opposites" (241). Helmut Pfotenhauer, who presents to us visual culture, makes the distinction that Weimar "later being perceived as classical, was classicistically oriented" before he too, acknowledges, however carefully expressed, that "Weimar Classicism and Romanticism were not as different as they have sometimes seemed" (267).

While Benjamin Bennett mainly enjoys dismantling and invalidating Schiller's Briefe zur ästhetischen Erziehung, he only settles for the term "German Classicism" because of the high level of abstraction that "Goethe and Schiller produced during the period of their association and collaboration" and decidedly...