Darmstadt district

This article deals with the circle of friends around Johann Heinrich Merck. For the group of experimental authors of the same name, see Darmstädter Kreis (Modern) .

The Darmstadt Circle was a literary circle of friends that was formed in Darmstadt from 1769 to 1773 around the writer and editor Johann Heinrich Merck , who lived there. It became important for the development of the sensitive style.

Members and goals

Its permanent members included Johann Gottfried Herder , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (called Der Wanderer or Der Pilger ), Franz Michael Leuchsenring , Herder's bride Caroline Flachsland (called Psyche ) and the ladies-in-waiting Henriette Alexandrine von Roussillon (called Urania ) and Luise von Ziegler ( called purple ). Many literary greats of the time were also friends of the Darmstadt Circle, such as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock , Christoph Martin Wieland , Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim , Sophie von La Roche , the brothers Friedrich Heinrich and Johann Georg Jacobi , Johann Caspar Lavater and the artistically interested Karoline Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt , who supported the district.

On the one hand, the members of the Darmstädter Kreis cultivated the rococo cult of friendship, feeling and nature; On the other hand, thanks to his open-minded advocacy for European literature in the time of the Sturm und Drang, a broad reception by many poets: William Shakespeare , Miguel de Cervantes , Francesco Petrarca , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Laurence Sterne , Oliver Goldsmith , Samuel Richardson , Edward Young or the Ossian fabric. From these literary interests, Klopstock's first edition of the Odes and Elegies (1771) and the translations of Shakespeare and Shaftesbury's works or European folk poems into German emerged.

Goethe and the Darmstadt District

Goethe - like Merck and Herder - used the gathering of friends several times as an occasion for literary criticism ; here he read for the first time from the as yet unpublished Urfaust and Götz manuscripts. His poems Wanderers Sturmlied , Der Wanderer , Felsweihegesang (to Psyche) , Elysium (to Urania) and Pilger's Morgenlied (to Lila) go directly back to experiences with the circle.

But the relationship between Goethe and the circle was not untroubled. The circle distanced itself in the controversy about the fair at Plundersweilern (1774) because of the poet's aesthetic changes. The farce directed against Leuchsenring, A Carnival Game by Pater Brey (1773) and Satyros or Der verötterte Waldteufel (printed in 1817), increased his distance, which was probably based on criticism of the overly emotional Werther . His experiences and the tensions between the Darmstadt saints are recorded in the 12th and 13th Book of Poetry and Truth .

literature

• Valerian Tornius : The sensitive in Darmstadt. Studies on men and women from the Werther period . Leipzig 1910
• Hermann Pfeiffer : Goethe and Merck in the Darmstadt Circle of Friends. A memorial book . Darmstadt 1932
• Walter Gunzert: Darmstadt and Goethe . Darmstadt 1949
• Lothar Baus: Goethe's goddess of the muses Urania alias Henriette Alexandrine von Roussillon . Homburg 1989. ISBN 3-925101-01-2
• Christine Pezzoli-Bonneville: Vie intellectuelle et Lumières à Darmstadt entre 1770 et 1774. Baroque, Sensibility et Sturm und Drang . (Dissertation) Paris 2000