ABSTRACT
One generalization on which historians are never likely to disagree very much is that German literature from the period of the Thirty Years War until the beginnings of an enormously vital literary revival around the middle of the eighteenth century was of undistinguished quality when compared with the better products of the literary art of much of western and southern Europe. There are a number of clearly discernible reasons for this. One may begin with the fact that Germany lacked not only a universally recognized high literary language and stylistic criteria appropriate to it, but also a single forum – a cultural ‘capital’ – in which such language and criteria could be discussed, debated and regularly reformulated and issued as standards which could act as a sort of ‘floor’ for poetic endeavour. The result was not only an unproductive scattering of literary energies which in a way paralleled the political fragmentation of the country, but also a retreat to the safer ground provided by imitation of known and respected foreign standards, including (for this period, especially) not only French but also the received traditions of Latin humanism which schools at all levels for a long time continued to teach as the first language of learned and literary discourse.
