THE HISTORY OF German-language pastoral is a story of neglect. This lukewarm reception of pastoral is bound up with the development of Germanistik as an academic field, which in turn was shaped by the course of German nationalism. Nineteenth-century nationalists saw little use for pastoral in their project of using culture as a carrier for ideas of the nation. The critic Georg Gottfried Gervinus is a case in point. He portrayed German-language pastoral as the embodiment of an age characterized by a lack of historical self-determination (“selbstbewegter Geschichte”) and an excessive hatred of war, which translates into an incapacity to represent anything other than states of repose (“ruhende Zustände”). Such a passive and pacifist form of writing was felt to have no place in the canon of national literature that would retrospectively project the emergence of a nation-state within the Germany of the nineteenth century, which remained fragmented into a patchwork of princely states held together only by the conservative framework of the German Confederation.

Far from being insignificant, however, German-language pastoral holds a particular interest, given that it illuminates broader processes of modernization that were reshaping German-speaking Europe in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century: economic developments, changes in class structures, and challenges to traditional hierarchies, authorities, and forms of governance. In this book, I argue that pastoral acted as a vehicle for identity formation for the emergent Germanspeaking middle classes in the eighteenth century. Arguably, its suitability for this task is precisely the reason why it was repudiated by nineteenthcentury nationalists, since writers of pastoral tended to represent the lives of small communities at the expense of the larger movements of history. These small communities could be used to celebrate middle-class values and cultures, often leaving the more intractable questions of the place of the middle classes within state and society out of view. This helps to explain why so many of the leading German-language authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth century wrote pastorals or included pastoral motifs in their major writings, since pastoral became a hugely significant vehicle for expressions of middle-class identities, which makes it an important key to understanding the culture of this period.