Chapter 4 - Literature and Religion in Germany 1770–1830

Summary

In the period 1770-1830 the progressive dissolution of the antithesis between religious inwardness and Enlightenment critique gave rise to historically unparalleled creativity in German literature and thought. This is also the age in which human subjectivity was decisively redefined by critical and then post-critical Idealism in German philosophy. Between 1770 and 1830 the twin heritages of rationalism in German Idealist philosophy and Pietism in the beginnings of modern biblical criticism came together. In so doing, both decisively affected the vocabulary of German literature and its function as a mode of cultural critique in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Germany. The development in German writing from the literature of Empfindsamkeit (Sentimentality) and Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) to Romanticism reflects the evolution of a specifically literary idea of inwardness which variously expresses and challenges theological and political constructions of the subject.