German-language Literature
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German-language Literature
German literature () comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German parts of Switzerland and Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there are some currents of literature influenced to a greater or lesser degree by dialects (e.g. Alemannic). Medieval German literature is literature written in Germany, stretching from the Carolingian dynasty; various dates have been given for the end of the German literary Middle Ages, the Reformation (1517) being the last possible cut-off point. The Old High German period is reckoned to run until about the mid-11th century; the most famous works are the ''Hildebrandslied'' and a heroic epic known as the ''Heliand''. Middle High German starts in the 12th century; the key works include ''The Ring'' () and the poems of Oswald ...
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Hildebrandslied
The ''Hildebrandslied'' (; ''Lay'' or ''Song of Hildebrand'') is a heroic lay written in Old High German alliterative verse. It is the earliest poetic text in German, and it tells of the tragic encounter in battle between a father (Hildebrand) and a son (Hadubrand) who does not recognize him. It is the only surviving example in German of a genre which must have been important in the oral literature of the Germanic tribes. The text was written in the 830s on two spare leaves on the outside of a religious codex in the monastery of Fulda. The two scribes were copying from an unknown older original, which itself must ultimately have derived from oral tradition. The story of Hildebrand and Hadubrand almost certainly goes back to 7th- or 8th-century Lombardy and is set against the background of the historical conflict between Theodoric and Odoacer in 5th-century Italy, which became a major subject for Germanic heroic legend. The fundamental story of the father and son who fail to reco ...
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Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (, short: ; 10 November 17599 May 1805) was a German playwright, poet, philosopher and historian. Schiller is considered by most Germans to be Germany's most important classical playwright. He was born in Marbach to a devoutly Protestant family. Initially intended for the priesthood, in 1773 he entered a military academy in Stuttgart and ended up studying medicine. His first play, ''The Robbers'', was written at this time and proved very successful. After a brief stint as a regimental doctor, he left Stuttgart and eventually wound up in Weimar. In 1789, he became professor of History and Philosophy at Jena, where he wrote historical works. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller developed a productive, if complicated, friendship with the already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works that he had le ...
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Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on Western literature, literary, Political philosophy#European Enlightenment, political, and Western philosophy, philosophical thought in the Western world from the late 18th century to the present.. A poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre-director, and critic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe bibliography, his works include plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. Goethe took up residence in Weimar in 1775 following the success of his first novel, ''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' (1774), and joined a thriving intellectual and cultural environment under the patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Duchess Anna Amalia that formed the basis of Weimar Classicism. He was ennobled by Karl August, G ...
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Weimar Classicism
Weimar Classicism () was a German literary and cultural movement, whose practitioners established a new humanism from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. It was named after the city of Weimar in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar because its leading authors lived there. The ''Weimarer Klassik'' movement began in 1771 when Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel invited the Seyler Theatre Company led by Abel Seyler, pioneers of the movement, to her court in Weimar. The Seyler company was soon thereafter followed by Christoph Martin Wieland, then Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder and finally Friedrich Schiller. The movement was eventually centred upon Goethe and Schiller, previously also exponents of the movement, during the period of 1786–1805. Development Background The German Enlightenment, called " neo-classical", burgeoned in the synthesis of Empiricism and Rationalism as developed by Christian Th ...
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Sturm Und Drang
(, ; usually translated as "storm and stress") was a proto-Romanticism, Romantic movement in German literature and Music of Germany, music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. Within the movement, individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements. The period is named after Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's Sturm und Drang (play), play of the same name, which was first performed by Abel Seyler's Seyler theatrical company, famed theatrical company in 1777. The philosopher Johann Georg Hamann is associated with ; other significant figures were Johann Anton Leisewitz, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, H. L. Wagner, and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller were notable proponents of the movement early in their lives, although they ended their period ...
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The Sorrows Of Young Werther
''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' (; ), or simply ''Werther'', is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the ''Sturm und Drang'' period in German literature, and influenced the later Romanticism, Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished ''Werther'' in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works. The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life, and involving love triangle, triangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff (who married Kestner); and the other involved Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano, Maximiliane Brentano, Maximiliane von La Roche (who married Brentano), and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem died by suicide on the night of ...
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Goethe
Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on Western literature, literary, Political philosophy#European Enlightenment, political, and Western philosophy, philosophical thought in the Western world from the late 18th century to the present.. A poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre-director, and critic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe bibliography, his works include plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. Goethe took up residence in Weimar in 1775 following the success of his first novel, ''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' (1774), and joined a thriving intellectual and cultural environment under the patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Duchess Anna Amalia that formed the basis of Weimar Classicism. He was ennobled by Karl August, G ...
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Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( ; ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a Prussian philosopher, theologian, pastor, poet, and literary critic. Herder is associated with the Age of Enlightenment, ''Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism. He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who argued that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people (''das Volk''). He also stated that it was through folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation (''der Volksgeist'') was popularized. He is credited with establishing or advancing a number of important disciplines: hermeneutics, linguistics, anthropology, and "a secular philosophy of history." Biography Born in Mohrungen (now Morąg, Poland) in the Kingdom of Prussia, his parents were teacher Gottfried Herder (1706–1763) and his second wife Anna Elizabeth Herder, nee Peltz (1717–1772) grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father's Bible and songbook. In 1762, as a yout ...
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The Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment) was a European intellectual and philosophical movement active from the late 17th to early 19th century. Chiefly valuing knowledge gained through rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment was concerned with a wide range of social and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state. The Enlightenment was preceded by and overlapped the Scientific Revolution, which included the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton, among others, as well as the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and John Locke. The dating of the period of the beginning of the Enlightenment can be attributed to the publication of René Descartes' ''Discourse on the Method'' in 1637, with his method of systematically disbelieving everything ...
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Johannes Von Tepl
Johannes von Tepl (c. 1350 – c. 1415), also known as Johannes von Saaz (), was a Bohemian writer of the German language, one of the earliest known writers of prose in Early New High German (or late Middle German—depending on the criteria). He was literate in Czech, German and Latin. Not much is known about him; historians presume that he probably studied at universities in Prague, Bologna and Padua. In 1383, he became a solicitor in Žatec (Saaz) and in 1386 a rector of the town's Latin school. He lived in Prague from 1411. He spent almost all of his life in the Kingdom of Bohemia, during the reign of kings Charles and Wenceslaus. Johannes von Tepl is best known for his early humanist poem '' Der Ackermann aus Böhmen'' (''Ploughman of Bohemia''), sometimes also called ''Der Ackermann und der Tod'' (''Ploughman and Death''), written around 1401 and first printed in 1460. It is a dialogue of Death and the ploughman, who accuses Death because his wife Margaretha recent ...
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Oswald Von Wolkenstein
Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376 or 1377 in Pfalzen – August 2, 1445, in Meran) was a poetry, poet, composer and diplomacy, diplomat. In his diplomatic capacity, he traveled through much of Europe to as far as Georgia (country), Georgia (as recounted in "Durch Barbarei, Arabia"). He was dubbed a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre and was also inducted into the Order of the Jar and the Order of the Dragon. He lived for a time in Seis am Schlern. Life Oswald's father was Friedrich von Sëlva, Wolkenstein and his mother was Katharina von Villanders. When he was ten years old, Oswald left his family and became a squire of a knight errant. Oswald described the journeys undertaken by him in the following 14 years in his autobiographical song "Es fügt sich...". He mentioned his travels to Crete, Prussia, Lithuania, Crimea, Turkey, the Holy Land, France, Lombardy (i.e. what is known today as Northern Italy) and Spain, as well as being shipwrecked in the Black Sea. After the death of his fath ...
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