Dropylaea (Die Propyläen) is generally held to have contained the most precise statement of the principles of Weimar Classicism. The very title of this journal, edited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which appeared in six parts between 1798 and 1800, was programmatic. It referred to the monumental gatehouse to the Acropolis and, as the introduction explained in a playful tone, it should be understood as “threshold, gate, entrance, antechamber” to a consideration of the arts, in particular the Classicism espoused by Goethe and his Weimar circle.
Goethe himself not only edited the journal but also contributed numerous essays. Other contributors were the Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Meyer, Schiller and Caroline and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Yet for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, only Goethe’s contributions attracted much attention and these were, more often than not, interpreted as a rather unworldly plea for a backward-looking veneration of the timeless artistic exemplars of the ancient world. As Daniel Ehrmann and Norbert Christian Wolf, the editors of Klassizismus in Aktion: Goethe’s “Propyläen” und das Weimarer Kunstprogramm, a stimulating new collection of essays, argue, the almost exclusive focus on Goethe has obscured Propylaea’s true message.
Their revisionist volume originated at a conference devoted to planning the first new complete edition of the journal since its original publication. This will be a major scholarly enterprise, resulting in a multidisciplinary view of the journal in its contemporary context. Its primary aim will be to reinforce the central message Ehrmann and Wolf elaborate in their introduction: that Goethe and his collaborators were not simply advocating a static, conservative classicism but rather presenting a programme for the present and the future: “classicism in action”, as the title of this collection of essays indicates.
Two parallel developments prompted Goethe’s idea for the journal. First, he had long planned to produce a more systematic account of his experiences in Italy (1786-88 and 1790) and to consolidate the aesthetic insights that resulted from them. In the meantime, however, the political turbulence in Europe had made travel more difficult, so that the buildings and works of art that he intended to describe could no longer easily be appreciated in their natural context. Even worse, after 1796 they were being plundered by Napoleon and, while it was known that Napoleon intended to display his spoils in Paris, Goethe believed that their relocation would make it impossible to appreciate them fully in the way that Winckelmann had advocated: that is, in their natural context and climate.
Developments in Germany also forced Goethe’s hand. His friend Schiller had aimed to promote Classicism by publishing a monthly journal between 1795 and 1797, but Horae (Die Horen, goddesses of the seasons or the natural portions of time) had not been a success. Schiller had enlisted an impressive array of authors, including Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte, among others. Yet the journal’s impact had been limited. On the contrary, the publication of Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (outpourings of an art-loving friar) in 1796 signalled the growing strength of the fundamental challenge to Classicism from Romanticism. Indeed, in 1798, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel responded to Propylaea by launching a rival journal, Athenaeum, in Jena, Weimar’s university town just 18km away. The product of perhaps the most important circle of young literary Romantics, this was designed as a manifesto for a “progressive universal poetry” that would embrace all the arts.
The strident claims of such brash, youthful modernism reinforced Goethe’s resolve. In his introduction he asserted that a fusion of the various genres was one of the most obvious indicators of the decay of art. The Romantics eulogised movement and progress, and Weimar Classicism responded with a more cautious reflective approach, anchored in the Classical models yet not slavishly in thrall to them. Propylaea aimed to create a theoretical framework, which made a clear distinction between nature and art, and which recognised art’s Classical historical roots, all with a view to providing guidelines for current and future artistic production.
Alongside conventional, almost academic, articles, and in the interests of engaging the readers, the journal included lighter essays, fictitious dialogues and letters, commentaries on translations, short notes and essay prize announcements. The first issue contained essays on Laocoön and His Sons, “the subjects of art” and “the truth and plausibility of works of art”. These opening statements prepared the ground for wide-ranging pieces on “Raphael’s works, particularly in the Vatican” or “educational institutions for the visual arts” by Meyer, or Wilhelm von Humboldt’s communication on “the current state of tragedy on the French stage”. Goethe’s own annotated translation of Diderot’s essay on painting, never much commented on in the literature to date, is highly significant for his rejection of Diderot’s argument that art should simply seek to emulate nature. Goethe insisted that true art—or rather, the artist—transforms the natural subject by emphasising what is meaningful, characteristic and noteworthy, thereby endowing it with a higher value.
Propylaea did not propagate a simple formula. On the contrary, its authors explored an extraordinary variety of potential forms of modern Classicism. Goethe’s discussion of Laocoön and His Sons, a paradigm of the Weimar perception of Classicism, made it clear yet again that the Parisian way was misguided. In stark contrast to the kind of politicised Parisian Classicism that one might find in Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793), Laocoön demonstrated the timeless natural qualities of autonomous art. According to Hans-Jürgen Schings, Goethe’s interpretation of Laocoön was a deliberate rebuke to David and to the accumulation of looted art in Paris.
Of course, Propylaea did not deflect Romanticism. It did, however, formulate an enduring vision of a Classicism that was not appropriated by the state. Its postulate of the necessary autonomy of the artist, of the artistic process and of works of art themselves still poses a challenge today. Ehrmann and Wolf and their collaborators in this volume have performed a valuable service by illuminating the European context of Weimar Classicism’s most important manifesto and the crisis that prompted its formulation in the wake of the French Revolution.
• Joachim Whaley is a professor of German history and thought at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire 1493-1806 (2 vols, Oxford University Press, 2012)
Klassizismus in Aktion:
Goethe’s “Propyläen” und das Weimarer Kunstprogramm
Daniel Ehrmann and Norbert Christian Wolf, eds
Böhlau Verlag, 404pp, €60.00 (hb);
in German only