ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century German literature began with a swift reaction against the pessimism underlying the baroque of the second half of the seventeenth century, itself the aftermath of the Thirty Years War which had decimated the population. Rational and optimistic, based on the tenets of natural law and the works of Leibniz as propagated by Christian Wolff, it too emphasized the notions of common sense, normality, probability, nature, imitation and rule. The mainstay of German Klassizismus was Gottsched, the upholder of good taste, the promoter of German as a literary language. Pedantic and despotic, Gottsched exerted a rather crippling though fairly short-lived influence on his contemporaries. The war put paid to possible developments along the lines of classicism, but Opitz’s booklet never fell into disfavour. The Trauerspiel fills the bill much better than tragedy: Goethe’s deepest convictions lay in an educational idea towards knowledge of the great laws governing the universe, in practice, towards greater humanity, awareness and fulness of life.
