ABSTRACT
While the assignment of fixed dates to the beginnings and ends of major movements in human history is always a somewhat artificial exercise, there is much to recommend the year 1740 as the beginning of a literary revival which by before the end of the century had elevated a long unappreciated German literature to a level of equality with the other major national literatures of Europe. In that year, in Zürich, appeared separate works by the two Swiss professors, J. J. Bodmer and J. J. Breitinger, which together launched the first salvos of a theoretical attack on the then dominant literary canons of Johann Christoph Gottsched. Influenced by the imaginative naturalism of early eighteenth-century English literature, as well as by the inspiring nature poetry of their countryman Albrecht von Haller and insights gleaned from translations from a simple but powerful medieval German literature, Bodmer and Breitinger turned away from the cool and abstract rationalism of Gottsched’s literary prescriptions in favour of a more emotional style, one more naturally ‘cluttered’ with metaphors, exclamations, asides, interrupted speech and other similarly ‘realistic’ devices. To Gottsched’s chagrin, the unfettering effects of this new approach, together with the continuing influence of English letters, soon showed up among his own younger disciples in Leipzig, some of whom founded a new and more ‘liberal’ journal, the Bremer Beyräge (1744–8), to satisfy needs not theretofore addressed in the existing ‘official’ magazine of the Gottschedian orthodoxy. The most popular writer in what now became a new literary circle in Leipzig was Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–69), who not only helped to popularize and elevate the quality of the epistolary style (adopted from the English novelist Samuel Richardson), but also became the best-known German author of fables and tales in a period when this genre enjoyed immense popularity all over Europe. Not quite so directly responsive to the stimuli mentioned above, but still indicative of the fresher climate of literary creativity, were the Anacreontic poets of Halle, centred around a generation of young Prussians including J. P. Uz, J. N. Goetz, J. W. L. Gleim and Ewald von Kleist, whose many drinking songs and poems of love, friendship and the beauties of nature were superficial and often even fatuous, but represented another pan-European literary fad of the mid-century which provided appropriate accompaniment to the light-hearted rococo style in the arts.
