The German Genius

seventeen and her husband was under nineteen. Before he died, two years later, she had borne him one son, Karl August, with another on the way. She became Weimar’s regent during her son’s minority, and it was in the nineteen years before his accession that she changed the court and made later developments possible. Anna Amalia’s mother was a sister of Friedrich the Great and shared his views on the importance of art, literature, and theater. 7 On first meeting Anna Amalia, Schiller found her mind “very limited” but, in her efforts to keep up with rival courts nearby, she brought troupes of actors to Weimar, then musicians—and then “literati.” There would be four men of world stature who Anna Amalia helped bring to Weimar, of whom the first was Christoph Wieland (1733–1813).
    Appointed in 1772 as tutor to Karl August, then fifteen, Wieland was already one of Germany’s leading authors. He was of middle-class origin (his father was a pastor) and this association, of aristocrats and the middle class, unwittingly initiated a process that was to result in the partial fusion of two culture groups that would together provide what became known as “Weimar Klassik .” * Writers whose origins were lower down the social scale could earn a good living in either Paris or London, but in Germany social distinctions were still relatively rigid and amid all the other changes that Weimar brought about, the social change was as important as any.
    Wieland’s early work, however, had earned him distinction among aristocrats, who counted. He had been a senator in his native town, Biberach in Württemberg, and a professor of philosophy at Erfurt (in Thuringia, central Germany); in his novel Der goldene Spiegel (The Golden Mirror; 1772), he had presented a political philosophy in the tradition of Lettres persanes in that it criticized current affairs in Europe in a fanciful Oriental disguise (this was a practice that had begun in France). The novel emphasized education even for princes and especially the importance of history. But Wieland was also known for his novel Geschichte des Agathon (The Story of Agathon; 1766–67), a narrative of a young man who learns through personal experience that the excessively spiritual “enthusiasm” of his youth was folly. This was, in its way, a first sighting of rudimentary Bildung , and Wieland’s importance lies in his early grasp of this concept. The loss of faith experienced by many figures of the Enlightenment seems to have been more intense, sooner, in Germany than in France or England. Following the Earl of Shaftesbury (a profound influence in Germany), Wieland understood that, in the age of doubt, a man can still live for knowledge, art, and reflection—“the enlargement of his mind”— and continue to fulfill traditional duties. 8
    Wieland took up his position in Weimar in September 1772 and immediately embarked on a project for a new literary monthly, Der deutsche Merkur , to accompany his primary responsibility, teaching Karl August. The first issue appeared in 1773 and was an immediate success. It continued publication for nigh on forty years and provided central Germany with a literary culture, in the process making Weimar, tiny as it was, the cultural capital. Wieland’s views overlapped with those of Friedrich the Great, who was still alive. He too thought Germans showed “a chronic uncertainty” in matters of taste, in marked contrast to somewhere like England, which had its “classics,” as we would say now. Wieland translated and published several Shakespeare plays in an attempt to show Germans what a “classic” from the post-classical world “looked like.” 9
    Wieland was always convinced of the cultural importance of the theater. He pointed out that the stage had been a political institution in ancient Greece and it was, even now, in the enlightened, nonabsolute parts of Europe, a moral institution, “capable of exercising a wholesome influence on the thought and manners of an entire people.” Wieland, we must remember, was writing at a time when theater had still to contend with the opposition of the church. Even if others didn’t, Wieland recognized the theater as a venue where people could experience new ideas in a shared capacity. (This is one reason why the church—and other authorities—objected.) The theater helped establish the actuality of “imagined communities,” as Benedict Anderson calls them; it helped spark the