GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

This article investigates the ‘radicality’ of the Sturm und Drang in relation to Enlightenment-era climate theory. In the wake of Montesquieu's seminal De l'Esprit des Lois (1748), the notion of climate as a fundamental driver of human culture was popularised across Europe. It is argued that Sturm und Drang authors embraced this trend while at the same time developing their own radical climate discourse distinct from Enlightenment-era climate theory. The texts surveyed here – by Goethe, Heinse, Herder, Lenz and Schiller – reject universalist idealisations of the Mediterranean and contest colonialist arguments for the creation of a moderate world-climate. Against this historical background of colonialist climate control, the Sturm und Drang poetics of climate reaches beyond ethnological-nationalistic origin-myths and irrationalist mythologies of nature, amounting instead to a critical engagement with the purposiveness of climatic variety and a poetological attempt to unite Enlightenment ideals of freedom with the thinking of difference. In this way, the article rejects a prominent understanding of the Sturm und Drang as formative for the development of climate theory in the German context, and as politically reactionary in its climate discourse. Rather, the article sets out a radically Enlightened Sturm und Drang poetics of climate.

This article builds on a passage from Johann Georg Hamann's Fünf Hirtenbriefe das Schuldrama betreffend (1763) to argue that the discourse on the rules of dramatic composition in the Sturm und Drang is shaped by an implicitly Lutheran logic of Christian freedom. That means that rather than emphasising the transgression of established rules, Sturm und Drang writers, like Luther's free Christian, sought to replace obedience to lower-level laws with submission to a higher principle. This Lutheran reframing of the Sturm und Drang revises the conventional understanding of the Sturm und Drang writers as literary revolutionaries and brings their aesthetic programme much more closely in line with their moderate political views. Moreover, in stressing the Lutheran underpinnings of Sturm und Drang aesthetics, this article also calls into question the established view that the theological aspects of Hamann's aesthetics are without parallel in the Sturm und Drang proper. At the centre of the Lutheran reinterpretation of the Sturm und Drang in this article stand analyses of J. M. R. Lenz's Anmerkungen übers Theater, Johann Gottfried Herder's ‘Shakespear’ and Johann Wolfgang Goethe's ‘Zum Schäkespears Tag’ and Götz von Berlichingen.

In his essay ‘Über die Soldatenehen’ and his fragmentary writings on military reforms Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz uses the distinctly moderate discourse of physiocratic economics to the radical ends of a complete restructuring of social relations. Lenz turns the logic of the physiocrats against more moderate reform efforts and presents a model of economic circulation that emphasises the role of labour in stark opposition to the physiocratic emphasis on land-ownership. The correction of economic streams extends to a less literal economy: that of ‘Konkupiszenz’. Central to Lenz's theological writings, ‘Konkupiszenz’, the divine gift of an inherently queer sexual desire, takes on an economic structure similar to that espoused in ‘Über die Soldatenehen’ that in turn proves central to his project of redefining the family in the military reform texts. Looking at both structures together, we can trace the way that Lenz's military writings call for liberating the flow of ‘Konkupiszenz’ across classes, which amounts to a radical reorganisation of the social and economic structure.

Recent scholarship tends to agree that Die Räuber is a play about two rebels, Karl and Franz Moor, who respectively represent the idealist and materialist strands of Enlightenment thought. What is often overlooked, however, is the brothers’ desire not merely to rebel against the status quo but also to establish new systems of authority. This article argues that Schiller's Die Räuber is primarily concerned with the problem of revolution. More than a mere rebel figure, Karl Moor seeks to replace the top-down system of authority based on the power of the law with a bottom-up system of power based on consent; similarly, Franz seeks to invert the top-down structure of law-based ethics with an egoistic system of behaviour based on desires. The drama reveals both revolutionary attempts to be doomed to failure, for neither bottom-up systems are able to escape the violence of necessity that govern all authority systems. Ultimately, the politics of Die Räuber is paradoxical: it evinces both the need for radical social transformation and the acknowledgement that such transformations are impossible. In the end, the reader is left to contemplate the gap between our desire for utopia and the limits of material reality.

This article asks why the radical authors Georg Büchner (1813–37) and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) were particularly interested in the life and works of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–92). The enquiry proceeds by reading Lenz's theoretical and literary works, such as his treatise Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774) and his plays Die Soldaten (1776) and Der Hofmeister (1774), through the later authors’ various writings. This article particularly focuses on all three authors’ use and analysis of observational writing for a radical, social purpose. It begins with a discussion of Lenz's stance on the imitation of nature in his writings on the theatre and how this affects his social commentary through realistic social depiction. This is followed by an examination of Büchner's use of Lenz's writings, particularly in the ‘Kunstgespräch’ section of the narrative fragment Lenz and in his play Woyzeck (1836), and then by Brecht's theoretical writing on the ‘realistic style’ (‘realistische Schreibweise’) in the history of German dramaturgy and his new approach in the adaptation of Der Hofmeister. The article concludes that Lenz's realistic style was taken up by his successors but that, especially in his depiction of and commentary on individuality, it maintains unique value in itself.

Published in 1777, J. M. R. Lenz's novella Der Landprediger has been read as a document of Lenz’ own intellectual and spiritual disorientation following his banishment from Goethe's Weimar in 1776. As Marcus Twellmann and others have shown, the novella responds to the agrarian reforms initiated by Margrave Carl Friedrich in Baden, which Lenz witnessed first hand. In this article, I argue that the novella's critique of gender and its discussion of economic and social reform are inextricably intertwined. My analysis proceeds from a key insight of recent scholarship in the field of ‘literarische Ökonomik’, namely that literature and philosophy do not simply exist in opposition to economics, but rather that all three share underlying concerns and, furthermore, that culture is ‘complicit’ with the ‘establishment and solidification of modern economic paradigms’ (Gray 2008). Lenz's novella underscores this complicity in a series of episodes that foreground themes of pedagogy, love and marriage, and Enlightenment social reform. Der Landprediger can be said to align with the concerns of twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist economics, insofar as it depicts the struggles of the homo economicus as a crisis of masculinity and recognises women as economic actors in the domestic sphere.

J. M. R. Lenz's Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774) present the aesthetic manifesto of the Sturm und Drang. In order to express its programmatic agenda for the modern drama, the text repeatedly attacks Aristotle's Poetics. This article reads Lenz's treatment of the Poetics not merely as a handy rhetorical foil for showcasing his own innovative dramatic theories, but rather as an integral part of the performance of the text. It turns out that there are similarities in both form and content between the two disparate treatises. By tracing the series of opposing terms that the Anmerkungen take up in succession (imitation and viewpoint; man and fate; tragedy and comedy), the analysis sets up a final reevaluation of the aesthetics of effect implicit in Lenz's treatise. Though he never mentions catharsis, this ambiguous Aristotelian terminus technicus can be a key to understanding the paradoxes of Lenz's text and revealing its potential radicality.