As a reaction against the religious themes of the agitated sixteenth and early seventeenth century came the development of rationalism and scientific spirit that produced the European Enlightenment. By absorbing the works of the British and French thinkers, the German professors discarded the theology of a world in which sinless men and women needed divine grace. They adopted an optimistic posture, the secular philosophy of a world ordered by natural law in which all humans, intrinsically rational and good, could, through education, aspire to perfection.
The first great German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, proposed a universe governed by a pre-established natural harmony. The idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant analyzed the power of reason and held a rational basis for ethics. Theatrical author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing returned to the structure of classical drama and introduced in German theater the English principle of tolerance in everyday affairs.
A current of emphasis on intuition and sentiment opposed rationalism. In religion, it meant a return to the values of the Gospel, known as Pietism. Many middle and lower class Germans became followers of Lutheran pastors P.J. Spener and A.H. Francke, who promoted the study of the Bible and the personal experience of spiritual regeneration expressed in ethical conduct. The University of Halle (1694) was the center of education, charity and preparation of Pietism missionaries. This current had an enduring influence in Lutheranism and in many German thinkers.
In literature the anti-rationalist tendency was headed in the eighteenth century by the Sturm und Drang movement (in German, 'storm and impetus').
The writers, in their revolutionary spirit, saw nature as a force in constant change and emphasized human values by their individual passions rather than in a spirit dominated by universal reason.
Contributing to this movement was the commitment of Johann Gottfried von Herder on the influence of history on literature, especially the importance of medieval folk songs and tales. Inspired by the French Revolution, anti-rationalism spread within early romanticism, in its principles related to the desires and feelings of the individual. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte saw the Universe as the basis of the disposed morality of God. August Wilhelm von Schlegel translated the works of Shakespeare that emphasized history and individual personality. Novalis wrote mystical Christian poetry.
These divergent but complementary currents were part of the work of three masters of German literature: Friedrich von Schiller, who wrote classic dramas in historical frameworks infused with moral convictions and where the struggle for freedom is constant; Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote lyric poems of deep moral anguish modeled on classical Greek forms, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the sage of Weimar, a giant of European literature. Goethe's early autobiographical novel, The Tribulations of the Young Werther (1774), summed up the romantic anguish. The most disciplined dramas Egmont (1788)
And Torquato Tasso (1790), inspired by their Italian travels, manifested a more sedate classic style. He combined Romantic and Classical views in his dramatic masterpiece Faust (part I, 1808, part II, 1832) © "Germany" Emmanuel Buchot.
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