The German Genius

seen as one of those who managed to open up a new organ and a whole new way of looking at things for the human spirit.” 22 “By 1871,” said someone else, “Graecophilia had become part of the national patrimony.” 23 To Goethe, Winckelmann was like Columbus.
    Winckelmann’s brutal murder by stabbing in Trieste (one of the origins of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [ Death in Venice ]) shocked the educated elite across Europe, adding a final dark twist to a remarkable career. 24
    “T HE T YRANNY OF G REECE OVER G ERMANY”
     
    Winckelmann’s reputation has lasted. He was criticized most notably during a competition organized in 1777 by the Academy of Antiquities in Kassel, which specifically examined Winckelmann’s contribution to antiquarian studies, and in which Christian Gottlob Heyne argued forcefully that Winckelmann’s claim that ancient art declined following its classical phase of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. was not supported by the available evidence. But, such criticisms notwithstanding, to underline how enduring his ideas proved to be we may say first that, in 1935, in the shadow of World War II, E. M. Butler published The Tyranny of Greece over Germany , an examination of the influence of Winckelmann—and Greece—on Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Carl Gotthard Langhans, Heinrich Schliemann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Stefan George. 25 “If I were constrained to write a history of German literature from 1700 onwards, I could only do so from this angle; for it seems to me that Winckelmann’s Greece was the essential factor in the development of German poetry throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth century…Greece has profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilisation, imposing her thought, her standards, her literary forms, her imagery, her visions and dreams wherever she is known. But Germany is the supreme example of her triumphant spiritual tyranny. The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly: they have been obsessed by them more utterly…” Butler did not think this obsession was entirely healthy. “Only among a people at heart tragically dissatisfied with themselves could this grim struggle with a foreign ideal have continued for so long.” 26 Henry Hatfield did not agree. In Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (1964), he concluded that, from Faust to The Magic Mountain , “From Winckelmann to Rilke, from Goethe to George, the majority of the greatest German writers have been ‘Hellenists’ to some significant degree.” 27
    T HE R ETURN OF THE “M ANY -S IDED ” M EN
     
    Winckelmann may have been the German equivalent of Petrarch, but it was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) who was the Marsilio Ficino of the north, the Renaissance figure who wrote on everything from philosophy to Christianity to astronomy to magic to mathematics. Generally regarded as the founder of modern German literature, Lessing too was a scholar, an antiquarian, a philosopher, a philologist, even a theologian, the first of the “many-sided men” who would characterize the third renaissance in Germany. Above all, Lessing was a symbol of the new, of the new world that existed in Germany—and to an extent throughout Europe—in the eighteenth century, which we have been exploring. This was nowhere more evident than in the fact that Lessing became the first famous German writer to live by his pen.
    Born in 1729 in Kamenz, northeast of Dresden, he was the son of a pastor and one of twelve children, five of whom died in childhood (not an unusual casualty rate in those days). 28 Lessing had a precocious passion for books and, at the age of six, it is said, refused to be painted with a birdcage in his hand, demanding instead a stack of books. He attended the University of Leipzig in 1746. Then known as “Little Paris,” Leipzig was the center of fashion and publishing, and where Johann Gottsched promoted his literary reforms in the Deutsche Gesellschaft. 29
    For the reasons we have been considering, the first generation of creative German writers with a voice of their own emerged around 1750. The most celebrated of these figures, who was slightly ahead of Lessing, was Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), who published the first three cantos of his religious epic, Der Messias ( The Messiah ), in 1748. 30 The publication of these cantos “of astonishingly sustained power, discipline and