Sturm und Drang
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The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
Albert Einstein
Sturm und Drang is sometimes translated as ‘Storm and Drive’ or ‘Storm and Urge,’
or more usually ‘Storm and Stress’. It is the name for a loose movement in German
literature and music (1760s-1780s) that pre-dated Romanticism. It is known for its
focus on individual subjectivity, the expression of extremes of emotion in reaction to
the restrictions of rationalism put forward by the Enlightenment. Isaiah Berlin
describes a Counter-Enlightenment.
One example would be Joseph Haydn’s minor-key works of 1772 are thought of not
only as an expression of personal turmoil in Haydn’s life, but as a product of the
Zeitgeist from which the literary Sturm und Drang movement also emerged.1
The German literary movement of the 1770s is generally associated with a small
collection of works of fiction.2 These demonstrated the authors’ preoccupation with
intense emotions, the irrational, the unconscious, and the spiritual; and their rejection
of the conventions of civilized society in favour of recovering a sense of oneness with
1
If you are interested in the music side of things see: Chantler. Abigail (2003) The "Sturm und Drang"
Style Revisited, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 34, No. 1 pp. 1731, which is in the big file under ‘Sturm und Drang’: this traces its influence on Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven.
2
Goethe's ‘Gitz von Berlichingen’ (1773) and ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’ (1774), Klingers
‘Wirrwarr’ (1776), Lenz’s ‘Die Soldaten’ (1776), and Schiller’s ‘Die Riluber’ (1781).
nature. However the historical significance of the literary Sturm und Drang derived
primarily from the aesthetic and philosophical ideas that underpinned the creation of
these texts.
The key thinkers of the movement were Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder (a
student of Immanuel Kant) and Johann Georg Hamann.3 Their philosophical worldview involved a rejection of the rationalism and neoclassicism of the Enlightenment.
Instead they advocated a pantheistic view of nature, the contemplation of which was
conceived as a spiritual experience. This necessitated an engagement with the
aesthetic category of the sublime, as a way to explaining the human aesthetic
experience of nature in its most awe-inspiring and magnificent manifestations. Goethe
and Schiller, went on to produce works of literature that formed the body and soul of
German classical thought.
This entailed a rejection of the secular outlook of many Enlightenment philosophes,
and represented a synthesis of the ideas of earlier thinkers: Spinoza, Rousseau,
Diderot, and Edmund Burke.4
Isaiah Berlin’s essays on Vico, Hamann and Herder are among his most important
studies in the history of ideas: the critical recovery of the ideas of the CounterEnlightenment and the explanation of its appeal, consequences and what it
anticipated. Vico, for example is credited with founding the human sciences. Hamann
offered the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and became a source of
romanticism. Herder, started a move towards populism and European nationalism,
rejecting universalism and rationalism but championing cultural pluralism. Berlin also
identified much of the next centuries’ irrationalism and suffering to the historicism
and particularism they advocated. The ‘Sturmer und Drangers’ demonstrated an
3
Herder’s focus upon language and cultural traditions (as the ties that create national feeling) included
folklore, dance, music and art, that inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German
folk tales.
4
The philosophes is a term for the intellectuals and philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment.
They were public intellectuals who applied reason to the study of history, science, politics, economics
and social issues. They promoted an international Republic of Letters to allow intellectuals to freely
exchange books and ideas being gathered in their Encyclopedias (such as Diderot’s ‘Encyclopédie, ou
Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers’ first published in 1751. They include
Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Anne-Robert-Jacques
Turgot, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
awareness of the dialectical relationship between 'self-creation' and 'self-destruction',
which Friedrich Schlegel was later to promote as the key to the creative process.
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Caspar David Friedrich (1818) Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
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Gerhard Richter (1969) Seascape (Cloudy)
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Anselm Keifer (1969) For Genet
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Caspar David Friedrich (c.1809) Monk by the Sea