ABSTRACT

When Schiller founded Die Horen in 1794 his aim was to unite the nation’s best writers in a single venture and their respective followings in a single public. 1 This was both a commercial calculation — cornering the market was a necessity if first-class writers were to be adequately paid — and a cultural ambition similar to the plan for a national theatre. There were numerous literary journals in eighteenth-century Germany, but this no more made for high literary standards than the multiplicity of theatres in different places, each inhibited by social or financial pressures, made for a thriving national dramatic tradition. Less journals of higher quality, or even one great and independent literary organ, would serve literature better.