Antiquity played a less significant role in Germany during absolutism and the Baroque period (seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century) than it had done in the Renaissance. Latin gradually gave way in some areas to a modern German literary idiom, and classical authorities were valued less as the natural sciences increasingly relied on experimentation and individual observation. Received paradigms paled in view of the upheavals of that period (‘‘Aber wenn der Tod uns trifft, / Was hilft da Homerus’ Schrift?’’, or ‘‘But when Death reaches us, / What use is Homer’s verse?’’ [Paul Gerhardt; cf. Riedel 2000: 83]). However, the engagement with antiquity remained notable in politics, philosophy, literature, music, visual arts, and architecture. This engagement served to develop, and partly already to question, a courtly-aristocratic culture in particular in the decades following the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48).
Philosophy and political theory, as well as literary works on historical topics, were dominated by a (neo-)Stoicism influenced heavily by Seneca and first expounded in the treatise De constantia (On constancy) by the Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius (15471606). This (neo-)Stoicism was closely linked to a Tacitean way of thinking. It had its origins in the crisis of the European monarchies during the religious and civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and consciously borrowed from authors of the Principate.
Martin Opitz (1597-1639) held the greatest significance for Baroque literature. His speech Aristarchus sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae (Aristarchus or on the neglect of the German language) called for German to be used, and his Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (Book on German poetry), partly based on Aristotle, Horace, and Quintilian as well as the poetics and poetry of the Renaissance, laid the intellectual foundation for later writers. He led the way for lyric and the novel (including pastoral poetry), and his translations of Seneca’s Troades and Sophocles’ Antigone became models for later tragedy. Lyric poetry mostly followed Horace (Paul Fleming [1609-40], Jacob Balde [1604-68]). The best-known playwright of the time was Andreas Gryphius (1616-64), who wrote four original tragedies on historical-political subject matter, among them Papinian, which was set in the late Principate and reflected the contrast between legal ideals and practice under absolutism and the uneasy situation of a bourgeois hero serving at court.
The history of the early Baroque period was marked by the Thirty Years’ War, while its outlook on the world was shaped by the predominance of the vanitas concept, and its aesthetics by a classicism following the influence of the poets of the Renaissance. The high Baroque of the second half of the seventeenth century reflected the postwar period and an increasingly feudal society. The language employed was elegant, sometimes bombastic, and motifs relating to the enjoyment oflife and love replaced those of death and the grave, changing from docere (teaching) to delectare (giving pleasure) and from Horace to Ovid. Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau (1617-79) modeled his poetry on Ovid in particular; Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635-83) wrote four tragedies on Roman subjects (Cleopatra, Agrippina, Epicharis, and Sophonisbe), which thematized conflicts between reason and passion and exemplified the ambiguity of political action while praising exemplary conduct. His novel Grofimiitiger Feldherr Arminius (Magnanimous General Arminius), marked by heroism and gallantry, sets Germans against Romans. Other novels (such as the Romische Octavia [Roman Octa-via] by Herzog Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig [1633-1714]) and epics likewise bear witness to a courtly approach to Roman history. In contrast, the most important work in prose of this time, Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (The adventurous greatest German simpleton) by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621/2-76), is rooted in the traditions of popular poetry, although even this novel contains numerous traces of classical writings, especially the Odyssey. The last of the well-known Baroque poets, Johann Christian Gunther (1695-1723), preferred those of Ovid’s poems that deal with more serious subject matters.
In music and musical theater, opera, which had first been developed around 1600 in Italy, claimed to revive Greek drama. Opitz had already introduced this genre to Germany with his libretto of 1627 for the opera Dafne, composed by Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672). Classical myth and history continued to supply the subject matter for most operas and also influenced oratorios and cantatas: Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) wrote the operas Orpheus und Eurydike, Der geduldige Sokrates (Patient Socrates), and Omphale as well as the cantata Ino. The works of Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759) include the operas Giulio Cesare, Xerxes, and Deidamia along with the pastorals Apollo e Dafne and Acis e Galatea, as well as the oratorios Semele and Hercules. Some of the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) also feature antique myths (Der zufriedengestellte J°olus [The satisfied Aeolus], Streit zwischen Phobus und Pan [Contest between Phoebus and Pan], and Wahl des Herkules [Hercules’ choice]).
Greek myth and Roman history offered the most popular motifs for painters and sculptors, and again Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a particular favorite. A number of aristocratic courts started archaeological excavations and collections, and such collections of antiques became a usual feature of a ruler’s displays at his court. Pediments, columns, and friezes were retained, and architects followed the prescriptions of Vitruvius, although they did move further away from classical models in other respects. Garden design and architecture was informed by classical myth, particularly when the subject matter suited the cult of the ruler (Hercules), and important Baroque gardens were created in Vienna, Dresden, Kassel, and Stuttgart.
Brandenburg/Prussia had an especially strong relationship to classical antiquity. Friedrich Wilhelm (the ‘‘Great Elector,’’ 1640-88) was influenced by (neo-)Stoic thought and had already given Roman culture a key role at his court. Statues imitating antique sculpture and pseudoclassical paintings adorned the palace at Berlin, and classically inspired figures were set in the ‘‘Lustgarten’’ (Pleasure garden). Friedrich III (1688-1713, as Friedrich I King in Prussia from 1701) continued this policy with increased vigor. Among the sculptures commissioned by him, the most noteworthy is a statue of himself wearing the dress of a Roman emperor with reminiscences of portrayals of Apollo and Alexander, together with an equestrian sculpture of his father based on that of Marcus Aurelius. He renovated and extended the palace in Berlin, added to the collection of antiques, encouraged the creation of the Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, the greatest catalogue of antiquities of its time, and founded the academies of the arts and sciences.
World History
