THE 1760S AND 1770S SAW increasing challenges to Salomon Gessner's status as Germany's foremost writer of pastoral. This chapter examines how the Sturm und Drang contributed to the development of German pastoral through an examination of the so-called Pfälzische Idyllen (Palatine Idylls) of Friedrich “Maler” Müller (1749–1825). Müller's cycle of three plays align closely with Herder's preoccupation with the renewal of German culture through a return to folk culture. Müller's plays are not ultimately concerned with ordinary people and their concerns, but with promoting a form of cultural renewal led by the middle classes, inspired by contact with folk culture. Here too the threshold between the middleclass poet and the peasantry is a key issue at stake. Müller aims to position the middle classes as the carriers of national culture, in contradistinction to both the aristocracy and the peasantry. The chapter aims to correct the view of some critics that the plays portray the education of the peasantry by the enlightened bourgeois Schoolmaster. I argue, rather, that the education process works in reverse: it is the Schoolmaster who is culturally enriched and made productive through his encounter with the peasant Walter, who in turn is represented as an unlikely combination of rustic coarseness and enlightened humanism, contesting the view that enlightened values are an achievement of the intellectual middle classes. Thus Müller's pastoral plays complicate the presume hierarchy of complex and simple societies: they suggest that the spirit of human self-determination is not uniquely the achievement of enlightened intellectuals, but that it can emerge from the sound instincts of the Volk, grounded in an understanding of the profound relatedness of the physical, moral, and intellectual life of human beings; and they demonstrate the possibility for national cultural renewal to emerge, not from grandiose schemes for cultural improvement such as Gottsched’s, but from the spirit of the Volk. Even so, Müller's plays ultimately suggest that the spark of genius that will set alight the culture of the nation remains the preserve of the middle classes.