Sturm und Drang
In Our Time: Culture
BBC
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2010
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the artistic movement known as Sturm und Drang.In the 1770s a small group of German writers started to produce plays, poetry and novels which were radically different from what had gone before. These writers were all young men, and they rejected the values of the Enlightenment, which they felt had robbed art of its spontaneity and feeling. Their work was passionate, ignored existing conventions and privileged the individual's free will above the constraints of society.The most prominent member of the movement was Johann von Goethe, whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther became its most notable success, translated into more then thirty languages. Despite this and other successes including Schiller's play The Robbers, the Sturm und Drang disappeared almost as quickly as it had emerged; by the mid-1780s it was already a thing of the past.With:Tim BlanningEmeritus Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge UniversitySusanne KordProfessor of German at University College, LondonMaike Oergel Associate Professor of German at the University of NottinghamProducer: Thomas Morris.
Transcript
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| 0:45.0 | Hello reflecting on the literature of his time the late 18th century satirist |
| 0:49.4 | Gaiog Christoph Lictenburg wrote If another and later species comes to reconstruct the human being |
| 0:56.0 | from the evidence of our sentimental writings, |
| 0:58.0 | they'll conclude man to have been a heart with testicles, |
| 1:01.0 | that is, passionate and male. This criticism was also a less |
| 1:05.7 | than flattering reference to one of the most significant intellectual movements of |
| 1:09.2 | the 18th century. In the 1770s a group of most of the young men wrote a series of daring works which shocked and delighted audiences at home and abroad. |
| 1:18.0 | Their books and plays favoured emotion, raw emotion over reason, personal liberty over morality. |
| 1:24.0 | The hero and figurehead was Gerta. |
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