Elystan Griffiths

‘Oft reiß ich mich aus der Stadt los, und fliehe in einsame Gegenden’: Social Criticism in Salomon Gessner’s Idylls

Abstract The article argues that the social criticism expressed in Salomon Gessner’s preface to his Idyllen (1756), and specifically the criticism of the state of the modern peasantry, is not germane to his writing. It demonstrates that Gessner’s writing takes its cues very substantially from Gottsched’s theoretical writing. By no means does Gessner maintain the distinction he expresses in his preface between the world of his idylls and the reality of Swiss peasant life. Rather, the distinction between idyll and reality is repeatedly blurred in the service of crafting an alternative bourgeois community based on an imagined nation of writers and patriots.

COSMOPOLITANISM, NATIONALISM AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION: THE EUROPEAN DIMENSION OF SOPHIE VON LA ROCHE’S JOURNAL POMONA FÜR TEUTSCHLANDS TÖCHTER (1783–84)

Abstract The article examines the European dimension of Sophie von La Roche’s educational journal ‘Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter’ (1783–84). It attempts to explain the dissonances in the journal surrounding female education with reference not to La Roche’s transitional position, but by examining the audiences that she was addressing in the journal. It argues that La Roche’s rhetoric addressed readers espousing various conflicting, but not mutually exclusive positions, including both progressive and more traditional attitudes towards women’s education, as well as cosmopolitan and nationalist stances. It argues that the journal’s presentation of James Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’ is marked by its attempt to mediate between these multifarious positions, but that La Roche also highlighted the unusually restricted circumstances of German women by means of her apparently open, cosmopolitan enquiry into the opportunities open to women in different European countries. The article then examines La Roche’s practice of translation in the journal, and demonstrates that polemical ideas were introduced to the journal through translated texts. The article concludes by suggesting that La Roche’s use of foreign literature illustrates, exemplifies and contributes to her complex practice of masquerade as a female editor and writer in an age where publicly active women found only limited acceptance.

Provincialism, Private Life and the Marginal Hero: Germany after Unification in the Works of Gustav Freytag, Friedrich Spielhagen and Paul Heyse

In his cultural history, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (‘Pictures from the German Past’) (1859–67), Gustav Freytag claimed that ‘the development of the Germans […] is also the age of the growth and liberation of the German middle class’.1 Several of Freytag’s major works are profoundly informed by this position, and posit the middle-class subject as the leading protagonist in German history. Both Freytag’s novels and his writing on cultural history may be understood as attempts to assert and to illustrate the claims of the middle class to ownership and control of the historical process. But the legitimacy of such claims was far from apparent in the 1850s, when Freytag and his collaborator Julian Schmidt started to articulate them in the leading cultural and political journal of German liberalism, Die Grenzboten. The failure of the 1848 Revolution to bring lasting political change to Germany occasioned a re-evaluation of strategy in German liberal circles; it demonstrated the weakness of a political movement founded upon ideas and without the backing of a substantial and well-ordered military power. Freytag argued in the Bilder that the German intellectual tradition had been strikingly abstract in its concerns, principally the pursuit of ‘truth and beauty’ (GW, XXI, 8).