Introduction

Summary

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been considered the “Golden Age” of German literature. This was never more the case than in the years immediately following the Second World War, when Germany's reputation was at its lowest ebb as National Socialist atrocities were being revealed in their horrific dimensions. By contrast, the Germany of the so-called Goethezeit, or Age of Goethe, seemed truly golden. Even before the war, Goethe and his fellow writers of the period named after him were upheld as model cosmopolitans who eschewed the rigid nationalism marking the Third Reich and focused on the ideals of acculturation (Bildung) rather than national conquest. It was a period when Germany gained the reputation of being the land of poets and thinkers, as Germaine de Staël famously surmised in her De l'Allemagne (1813), a brief period of intense intellectual ferment with dreams that seemed to idealize Enlightenment utopias of universal peace and widespread individual intellectual development before a reactionary phase set in after Napoleon was definitively vanquished in 1815. Repressive measures enacted at the Congress of Vienna and in Restoration Germany caused this later era's most famous poet, Heinrich Heine, to claim his nation had been transformed from the land of poets and thinkers (Dichter und Denker) into the land of judges and executioners (Richter und Henker). With the exception of the brief progressive literary and political blossoming preceding the revolutionary year 1848, one could justifiably claim that Germany has never experienced such a hopeful, progressive, artistic, and idealistic period as the Age of Goethe either before or since.