ABSTRACT
The sense of a ‘particular time and place’ in Goethe’s and Schiller’s work may seem to stop short of politics. The years in which they prepared and created Classicism saw, after all, great upheavals in European society. The French Revolution, regicide and republic, began the destruction of absolutism and made every throne in Europe insecure; the Revolutionary Wars forged the French into a new kind of nation, and showed up correspondingly how incapable the Holy Roman Empire was of concerting diplomacy or war. Of all this there is little echo in the classics we have discussed, except Hermann und Dorothea. It used indeed to be held that withdrawal from contemporary realities into timeless art was the essence and achievement of Classicism, made possible and symbolised by the separate peace with France which Weimar, as a satellite of Prussia, enjoyed for precisely the decade of ‘Hochklassik’. More recent criticism has perpetuated the view that Classicism was a withdrawal, but has decried this — on the principle that writers should be ‘involved’ — as escapism.
