Introduction

Abstract

If literary historians agree on anything, it is that Weimar Classicism as a distinct literary period ought not to exist. And of course they are right. Literary periodization is heuristic and even arbitrary under the best of circumstances. But to assert that the efforts of two men, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), from the time of the former's eye-opening journey to Italy in 1786 to the death of the latter in 1805, constitute a literary period in its own right seems excessive. Not only is the membership of the putative period so small (we could and will add lesser known names to the list) and so local (confined to those residing or sojourning in the small duchy of Saxe-Weimar, or wishing they did), the major problem, as many critics have shown, is that the characteristics of Weimar Classicism are perfectly consistent with those of European Romanticism, a bona fide literary period that easily embraces the phenomenon under discussion. Indeed, as twentieth-century scholars have never tired of pointing out, from the perspective of English and French literary history, Goethe and Schiller are among Germany's premiere Romantic writers. Only nineteenth-century German nationalism thought to exalt them to the level of the classical. Even Goethe himself can readily be enlisted in the effort to debunk the myth of Weimar Classicism.