INTRODUCTION

The concept of a national literature that expresses the peculiar characteristics of a given people began to capture the imagination of German intellectuals around the middle of the eighteenth century. Lessing fired one of the first shots of the culture wars in his seventeenth Literaturbrief of 1759, in which he challenged the Germans to stop imitating the French and start writing authentically German plays. He continued his assault on French cultural hegemony through the following decade, most notably in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–68). Klopstock took up the cause in 1764 with a series of patriotic odes in praise of the German language, German wine, and the old Germanic fatherland. Herder signaled the birth of a new era with his Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 [Journal of my Journey in the Year 1769], in which he rejected classical norms in favor of the “primitive” genius of indigenous cultures, his own included. By the early 1770s Teutophilia gripped the nation, as a generation of young men began to cast themselves as the new bardic poets of Germania's ancient legacy. Among them Goethe seemed destined to become the Messiah of the new movement, a role he was both willing and talented enough to play. His historical drama Götz von Berlichingen (1771) promised that he would answer Lessing's call for a German Shakespeare whose works could establish a national theatre. Earlier that same year Goethe had written poetry of unprecedented lyric intimacy in his “Sesenheimer Lieder,” an accomplishment that signaled beginnings of European Romanticism.