Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), two sons of Prussian pietists and a Swabian poet, are among a handful of thinkers most responsible for initiating a holistic turn in German thought in the second half of the eighteenth century. If this era is generally associated with the end of the Enlightenment, the writings of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller represent the German “Counter-Enlightenment,” dedicated to the premise that the genuine meanings of things derive from their interactive functions in a developing, self-determining whole. Hamann and Herder are also known to historians of German culture as prime movers of the so-called “Storm and Stress” (Sturm und Drang) movement epitomized in the theater - its artform of choice - by the early plays of Schiller (The Robbers) and Goethe (Götz of Berlichingen). This highly self-reflective movement derives from an identity crisis that is both national and philosophical, because the effort to establish a distinctively German literature in the face of France's cultural hegemony coincides with the question of the nature of reason itself.