ABSTRACT
On 31 January 1827 Goethe, speaking to Johann Peter Eckermann, famously declared that “national literature means little now, the age of Weltliteratur has begun; and everyone should further its course” (Goethe 11). In fact, nothing was further from the truth. If anything, the period immediately following upon Goethe’s death in 1832 was precisely that of national literatures – beginning with Goethe’s own German literature. Only 3 years later, Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–1871) published the first volume of his Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen (1835), the first systematic study of a European national literature, with the fifth and final volume appearing in 1842. Goethe had envisaged an important role for German literature as intermediary, via translation, for what he saw as the coming era of world literature. He also saw such world literature as mainly the concern of an intellectual and cultural elite, swayed by cosmopolitan ideals, a Weltbürgerlichkeit such as that propagated some decades earlier by Immanuel Kant. In this respect, as in many others related to the so-called Weimarer Klassik of which he himself, along with Schiller, was the main proponent, Goethe, though one of the initiators of Romanticism in Germany and Europe with his Leiden des jungen Werthers (1875) and other early works, also acknowledged himself as still standing in the tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals and the République des Lettres. The national literary histories that saw the light all around Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, and that basically continued to set the tone for their twentieth-century successors, were closely tied to the Romantic ideals of Herder, who saw literature in the vernacular, and the vernacular itself, as the expression of a nation’s identity, where the idea of “nation” was precisely defined as a people sharing a language, culture and, from there, ideally, the same physical-geographical space and one political system. The notions of “nation and “state” thus came to coalesce in the “nation-state”, which became the normative model for Europe, and later also beyond.
