Romanticism's Old German as Stepping-Stone to Goethe's World Literature

Summary

“So wie jetzt wurden die alten noch nie gelesen und übersetzt.” Ludwig Tieck's claim, raised in the introduction to his edition Minnelieder aus dem Schwaebischen Zeitalter (1803), bears witness to the renewed attention the so-called Old German [altdeutsche] literature received around 1800. The rise of nationalism in the wake of the napoleonic occupation and the quest for a German identity fueled the interest in the literary heritage that extended, as understood in the Age of Goethe, from the earliest monuments of the German language to the literature of the seventeenth century. Working against the backdrop of the Romantic project, several editions and collections, each varying in shape and design, aimed at incorporating the premodern literature into the poetic canon—among them Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812-15), Joseph Görres's Die teutschen Volksbücher (1807), Ludwig Tieck's edition of Minnesang poetry, and Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806-8), which was subtitled “die alten deutschen Lieder” and dedicated to Goethe. The classical Goethe, nonetheless, resisted all Romantic wooing and remained an uninterested bystander. The Romantics were, to his mind, once again following in his footsteps; in other words, they were venturing into territory he had explored before (in his Sturm und Drang phase) but long since left. A return, he seemed convinced, would mean a regression. Not until his aesthetic reorientation after the death of Schiller, and the start of his biographical projects, did Goethe reconsider his reservations.