Sturm und Drang: the meaning behind Germany's storm-and-stress movement

What the name means and where it began

Sturm und Drang takes its name from a play by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, published in 1776 and set during the American Revolution. The title translates literally as storm and stress, and it ended up naming the whole movement. Treccani places the period between roughly 1760 and 1785, as the closing phase of German pre-Romanticism.

The groundwork was laid earlier than the name itself. According to Treccani, it drew together the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the rehabilitation of feeling in English and Swiss aesthetics, religious Pietism, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naturalism.

A program against Enlightenment reason

The movement’s program, according to Treccani, leans entirely on the irrational as a force in life and art, set against Enlightenment intellectualism. The Encyclopedia of German Literature reaches a similar conclusion: under Rousseau’s influence, Sturm und Drang moved away from the Neoclassicism that dominated at the time and put subjectivity, artistic invention and the pull of nature at its center. The New World Encyclopedia adds that the individual and extreme emotion found room to breathe, as a reaction against the limits Enlightenment rationalism had imposed.

Among its central themes, Treccani also points to the idea that every individual has a right to pursue their own deepest longings; from there comes the celebration of figures such as the natural man, the titan and the superman. These are not reassuring heroes, though.

Practical example: picture a protagonist who acts out of revenge or greed rather than a noble cause: the New World Encyclopedia says this is exactly the kind of character Sturm und Drang literature favors. These are stories with an anti-aristocratic edge, giving weight to what is plain, genuine or starkly real, even when it hurts or unsettles.

Leading authors and works

Treccani names Goethe, Schiller, Lenz, Herder and Klopstock as the movement’s main authors, with Goethe as its central figure. The Encyclopedia of German Literature narrows that list to Goethe, Schiller and Herder.

Three works stand out above the rest. Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther follows a hopeless love that ends with the protagonist’s suicide; the New World Encyclopedia reports that it is believed to have inspired several imitative suicides among young readers at the time, an effect the sources describe with caution and without precise numbers. Schiller’s Die Räuber, from 1781, laid the groundwork for melodrama to be recognized as a theatrical form in its own right. Götz von Berlichingen, also by Goethe and dating to 1773, is the historical drama that marked his stage debut. Herder, for his part, laid out the movement’s theoretical program in the essay collection Von deutscher Art und Kunst, from 1773.

Treccani also points to Prometheus and Urfaust, both by Goethe, as works that represent the movement’s highest synthesis.

From pre-Romanticism to Romanticism

The movement did not stand still. According to the New World Encyclopedia, both Goethe and Schiller moved into Weimar Classicism, and from there the path continued toward early German Romanticism, which carried over its concern with feeling and nature while adding social and political goals and an almost religious regard for everything natural. The Encyclopedia of German Literature sums it up as a forerunner of Romanticism.

Treccani notes that the movement found no direct followers in Italy, though it points to a kindred spirit in Vittorio Alfieri.