17 - Herder's Reception and Influence

Summary

THE STUDY OF THE RECEPTION OF and influences on literature is relatively new and, for the works of many authors, has hardly begun. Current literature tends to receive the most attention. In the past, literary works were often co-opted for ideological reasons and in the process misinterpreted and distorted; this was the case with Johann Gottfried Herder through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Ultimately, Herder was discredited by nationalist perversion of his works during the National-Socialist era. Whereas there are several studies dealing with Herder's early-twentieth-century reception history, little has been done regarding Herder's influence in earlier periods and hardly anything pertaining to the reception of his works during his lifetime. At best, the most important reviews of his works are noted. Hence, published evidence of Herder's largely unacknowledged influence on the work of other authors and of the broad absorption of his aesthetic and philosophical insights by the literate public is hard to come by. This chapter can only hint at the changing conceptions governing the currents of literary influence. But the magnitude of Herder's imprint on the past, which will be sketched here, calls for his prominent inclusion in accounts yet to be written.

1. Herder's Reception and Influence up to 1830

Herder's early works, produced in Riga, the fragments Über die neuere deutsche Literatur (On Recent German Literature, 1766–1767) and the Kritische Wälder (Critical Forests, 1769) were anonymous occasional writings with a decided point of view. They discussed critically the most renowned German authors and for that alone aroused great public attention. The Fragmente and the Kritische Wälder not only affected the literary life of Germany around 1770, particularly stimulating the young writers of the Sturm und Drang period, but continued to exert influence at the end of the century in the works of the early Romantic theorists.

Herder's most significant attainment in literary history is considered to be his influence on the young Goethe beginning with their first encounter in Strasbourg in October of 1770. Goethe's extensive account in the tenth book of his autobiographical work Dichtung und Wahrheit (1812) of their time together in Strasbourg, epochal for German literature as the onset of revolutionary change, soon was widely and lastingly spread abroad in repeated editions of lexicographical monuments such as the Brockhaus Realenzyclopaedie, right up into the twentieth century.