Middle Class Counter-Enlightenment

Elias suggests that the blossoming of German literature in the late 18th century was largely led by middle-class writers and thinkers whose tastes and styles ran directly counter to the Francophile culture of Frederick’s court:

“This German literary movement, whose exponents included Klopstock, Herder, Lessing, the poets of Sturm und Drang , the poets of ‘sensibility,’ and the circle known as the Gottinger Hain , the young Goethe, the young Schiller” were among them. He continues, “In the writings of the young generation of the Gottinger Hain one finds expressions of wild hatred directed against princes, courts, aristocrats, ‘Frenchifiers,’ courtly immorality and intellectual frigidity. And everything among middle-class youth one finds vague dreams of a new united Germany, of a ‘natural’ life – ‘natural’ as opposed to the ‘unnatural’ life of court society – and again and again an overwhelming delight in their own exuberance of feeling.”