The Scope of German Literature in the Eighteenth Century

Richard Rorty has remarked about the Enlightenment, the cultural and philosophical movement most associated with the eighteenth century: “It is sometimes said that the Enlightenment project has failed. But there were two Enlightenment projects — one political and one philosophical. One was to create heaven on earth: a world without caste, class, or cruelty. The other was to find a new, comprehensive, worldview which would replace God with Nature and Reason. The political project has not failed, although it is proceeding very slowly [. . .]. The second, philosophical project is being pursued . . .” However we assess the success or failure of the Enlightenment, the eighteenth century stands out for its important and decisive cultural developments, the effects of which are still felt today. Within a span of about a hundred years, the Age of Enlightenment, as the eighteenth century is usually referred to, brought intellectual and social changes based on the use of reason, common sense, and natural law. These were paralleled by an emphasis on morality, feelings, and the emotions in religious, especially Pietist circles. Progressive thinkers in England, France, and later in Germany began assailing the orthodoxy and authority of the Church and the absolutism of rulers; in Germany the line led from Thomasius, Leibniz, and Wolff to Lessing and Kant, to the advocacy of religious tolerance, the demand for emancipation of the bourgeois individual, and the rise of an educated bourgeois middle class. Literary developments encompassed the emergence of a shared literary language, a bourgeois, secular literature and a national (German-language) theater. This was made possible by advances in literacy and education, especially among bourgeois women, and the reorganization of book production and the book market.

Although often identified solely with the Enlightenment, its most prominent philosophical movement, “the eighteenth century is plural,” and has many faces. There is no singular literary work or phase that might signal a clear-cut beginning or distinct ending on which scholars of German literature could nowadays easily agree. Strict periodization and dividing lines appear more problematic today than ever before. Literary periods do not live by dates, and in selecting works or authors whose spirit or works would embody a specific period or set of literary characteristics, we encounter anomalies and anachronisms.