ABSTRACT
Despite the ambiguity of the terms ‘Enlightenment’ and Aufklärung as labels designating a cultural epoch of the eighteenth century, their widespread use suggests that they are still serviceable. Cultural historians have used these words to describe the period that began with the lawyer, philosopher and pedagogue Christian Thomasius in the 1680s and which reached its peak with the popularity of Christian Wolff in the 1730s and 1740s. The literary Enlightenment in Germany produced its first works in the 1720s, when Brockes published his collection of poems entitled Irdisches Vergnügen in GOtt, and achieved its greatest impact by the dominance of such influential authors as Wieland and Lessing from the 1750s to the 1770s. In a narrow sense, the Enlightenment encompasses those figures in the eighteenth century who acknowledged the autonomy of reason, and hence of the individual, and who sought to apply reason to all areas of human existence by using literature didactically, with a view to educating as many people as possible. But ‘Enlightenment’ is also a designation for the entire age, an age which was as little uniform in its goals and beliefs as any other.
