The Enlightenment originated in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and

German Enlightenment Literature 
 
German literature raised enlightenment to a new level with its many artistic 
discoveries. This can be seen in the example of Schiller's tragedy Wallenstein and 
Goethe's Faust. Schiller (in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) and Goethe 
(in Wilhelm Meister's Student Years) argued that people living in the realm of 
«poverty and contemplation» could be rehabilitated through art.
The Enlightenment was afraid of over-indulgence in emotion, and avoided 
the sentimentalism inherent in artists such as Russo, L.Stern, O.Goldsmith. In the 
eyes of the enlighteners, giving in to excessive emotion was not characteristic of 
the common man, and for great men it was found to be a feature that obscured his 
social outlook. For this reason, enlighteners either resorted more to genres close to 
the ground or to a higher genre — tragedy.
The enlighteners criticized the stereotyped laws of seventeenth-century 
classicism, qualitatively changed its aesthetics, introduced into it anti-oppressive 
ideas, enlightened tones. Voltaire's «Oedipus,» «Brutus,» Schiller's «Messianic 
Bride» tragedies, and Goethe's «Iphigenia in the Tauride» are notable in this 
respect. Innovation in the literature of the Enlightenment was manifested not only 
in a new idea, but also in a new form. The enlighteners gave a new look, a new 
content to the existing forms.
The development of the drama genre has reached a new level. Classicism 
deviated from the demands of drama on the upper (tragedy) and lower (comedy) 
genres, the protagonists of the drama are ordinary people, and the theme is 
characterized by modernity. The main genre of Enlightenment literature – the 
novel – emerged. The Enlightenment novel was a free genre, not subject to strict 
requirements, not limited in space and time, the main object of the image was real 

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reality and individuals. The novel genre was especially successful in England. J. 
Swift's «Gulliver's Travels» and D. Defoe's «Robinson Crusoe» novels 
demonstrated the potential of this genre. This stage, called enlightenment in 
literature, was a theoretical and aesthetic step forward, creating new genres in 
fiction – educational novels, domestic novels, philosophical short stories, comic 
epics, etc., and discovered new methods of analyzing the human psyche.
The great German poet and thinker, the last brilliant representative of the 
European Enlightenment, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, was born in 1749 in Leipzig 
to a family of imperial advisers. His father, Johann Caspar Goethe, was an imperial 
adviser and a doctor of jurisprudence. His mother, Elizabeth Goethe, daughter of 
Hextor Mayor Johann-Wolfrang Testor, was married at the age of 17 to a 38-year-
old counselor.
The eldest child in the family, Johann first studied in Leipzig and then in 
law and natural sciences in Strasbourg. In 1771 he defended his dissertation on the 
relationship between church and state. In addition, Goethe was interested in the 
myths of geology, optics, animals and plants, studied art history, painted, listened 
to lectures on Shakespeare's works, wrote poetry. In addition to Shakespeare, the 
young Goethe was strongly influenced by the work of romantic writers such as W. 
Scott, Gizo, Wilmen and Cousin, but also by the flight of philosophical thought in 
the works of philosophers such as Fixte, Shelling, Gegel. 
Played a major role in shaping his worldview. Goethe began his career in 
the 70s. His first dramas «Gyos von Berlixingen», «Prometheus», «Muhammad», a 
number of poems brought him great fame. In 1774 he wrote the novel The 
Sufferings of Young Werther. In it, the image of the young soul's romantic 
experiences is connected with social events. In 1776, Goethe was appointed 
minister to Duke Carl Augustus. He tries to use his position to carry out democratic 
reforms, but his dreams are thwarted, his intentions are thwarted, and Goethe 
decides to travel to Italy in 1786-1788. As a result of these travel impressions, he 
wrote the dramas Iphigenia in Taurida (1786), Egmont (1788), and Torquato 
Tasso. 

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24 
The French bourgeois revolution of 1789 aroused a conflicting thought in 
his heart. He cannot accept the bloodthirsty, fraternal nature of the revolution, he 
does not want such things to happen in his homeland. These views are reflected in 
the "Venetian Epigrams" (1790), the drama "Civil General" (1793), the short story 
"Conversation of German Immigrants" (1794), the epic "German and Dorothy" 
(1794). In 1794, he befriended G. Schiller, a brilliant representative of German 
classicism. 
At the heart of Goethe's novels The Student Years of Wilhelm Meister 
(1793-1796) and The Wilhelm Meister's Exile Years (1821-1829) was the question 
of man's duty to society. Goethe's worldview was greatly influenced by the socio-
philosophical views of the East. He himself explains his reference to the subject of 
the East: "The conditions and times of life in Europe demand it." The East is more 
attracted to him than to the depressed European reality after the Napoleonic War. 
Goethe was well acquainted with the culture, history and literature of the East, and 
was closely acquainted with the works of great oriental artists such as Ferdowsi, 
Anwari, Saadi, Nizami, Rumi, Hafiz, Jami. He considers Hafiz Shirazi as his 
mentor. The vitality of Eastern poetry, the sense of confidence in the human mind, 
in its possibilities, fascinates it. This mood is reflected in his series of poems 
"Maghrib-u Mashriq devoni" published in 1819. 
Meanwhile, Goethe continues his work on the great work Faust, which he 
began in 1772. Faust is the result of Goethe's research throughout his career and 
vividly reflects the views of the European Enlightenment movement. At the heart 
of Faust is a legend in which a rebel Dr. Faust, who has mastered the sciences of 
the world and the unseen, sells his faith to the devil. 
According to scholars who studied Goethe's work, Faust was a historical 
figure who lived in the VI-VII centuries, famous for his extraordinarily sharp mind 
and strange personality, and loved to travel. It is not known whether he was an 
extremely talented, intelligent man, or a sly, sly man. But his deeds and miracles 
impressed the people, believed in the people and made them love them. This has 
led to the fabrication of many legends about Faust. Spitz, a 16th-century Frankfurt 

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25 
publisher, summarizes all the legends and stories about Faust in his History of the 
Famous Fortune Teller and Magician Dr. Johann Faust.
In Spitz's interpretation, Faust concludes a treaty with the devil when he is 
unable to use the power of thought and knowledge to do something that man 
cannot do, that is, when he fails to summon the legendary beautiful Helena to his 
side from the depths of centuries. Will be available. Shpis believes that for the 
rebellious Faust to do so, he must burn in hell in the world. The rebellious Faust 
fascinates Goethe personally, first referring to the apotheosis of Faust in Prafaust.
Faust is a complex work, full of symbols and meanings. It does not specify a 
specific place and period, does not name specific individuals, but the epic reflects 
the problems and ideas of its time. At that time, it reflected the sufferings and 
aspirations of all mankind. Goethe looks at man with boundless love and 
confidence, admires his power, suffers from his weakness. The tragedy of Faust is 
devoted to the study of the spiritual potential of man. “Faust” is written in poetic 
form and is a two-part tragedy. Faust is full of hope and confidence in man.
The struggle for goodness and progress in life never ends. Therefore, at the 
end of the work, the spirit of Faust passes to the judgment of the angels of heaven, 
not to the devil, who celebrates, «This slave has been with me for a long time, 
when the time has come for the face to fall.German Literature of the Eighteenth 
Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility.
Book Description: The Enlightenment was based on the use of reason, 
common sense, and "natural law," and was paralleled by an emphasis on feelings 
and the emotions in religious, especially Pietist circles. 
Recovery from the devastating Thirty Years’ War was reflected in the 
cultural life of the Holy Roman Empire and in the various German states. The era 
of confessional conflict and war had come to an end in 1648, but urban culture 
continued to decline, and the empire became a country of innumerable courts. 
Dependent mostly upon princely patronage, cultural life became decentralized and 
very provincial. By the middle of the 18th century, however, after decades of 
exhaustion, stagnation, and provincialization, a significant cultural and literary 

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26 
revival occurred that was to provide the basis of one of Germany’s most exalted 
literary periods, the Weimar Classicism of the 1790s (sometimes called the “age of 
Goethe”).Rationalism 
This recovery was accompanied by a new understanding of man’s ability to master 
nature and by a belief in his rational capacity to set his own moral course. 
Enlightenment optimism envisioned progress as attainable through education and 
science. The foundations of this rationalism were laid in science by Sir Isaac 
Newton and in philosophy by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with his Essais de 
Théodicée (1710; Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, 
and the Origin of Evil) and his Monadologie (1714; Monadology). To Leibniz this 
was the best of all possible worlds. He constructed a model for the universe as an 
absolutist state with God as the monarch, or central monad, which all other 
monads, including man, reflect and strive to emulate. This metaphysical model of 
the universe influenced European writers from Voltaire (who satirized Leibniz in 
Candide) to Goethe, who as late as 1832 represented the protagonist of Faust as a 
monad seeking salvation. 
During the period of economic decline in the second half of the 17th 
century, the German courts and the educated class had sought to profit from the 
progressive developments in France by adopting not only the standards of French 
civilization but also its language. Leibniz wrote most of his essays in French or in 
Latin, which was the language of university scholarship. Those who wrote in 
German needed to free themselves from charges of provinciality and from foreign 
dominance. Considering popular German culture plebeian and vulgar, the 
aristocracy read only French literature and listened to Italian opera. By the 1750s 
the effort to demonstrate that German was capable of literary expression led to a 
search for roots in national history and a discovery of an indigenous German 
tradition in folk songs and ballads. These enterprises would serve as models for a 
national literature. 
Early EnlightenmentThe first literary reforms in Germany between 1724 
and 1740, however, were based on French 17th-century Classicism. Its primary 

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27 
proponent was Johann Christoph Gottsched, a professor at Leipzig whose Versuch 
einer kritischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (1730; “Essay on a German Critical 
Poetic Theory”) provided examples for German writers to follow. 
Gottsched’s principal criterion for the production and reception of literature 
was reason. Basing his precepts on a literal interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics, he 
argued that Nature was governed by reason and that it was the task of poets to 
imitate reason as it manifested itself in Nature. He also initiated a reform of the 
German theatre aimed on the one hand against the Baroque extravagance of the 
aristocratic theatre and on the other against the vulgarity of popular theatre. He 
introduced tragedies and comedies conforming to the models of French Classicism, 
and he expelled from the stage the popular figure of the clown along with the 
clown’s crude jokes and ad-libbing. In addition, Gottsched edited some of the first 
German moral weeklies (so called because they were published for the moral 
edification of the middle class), which were patterned after English models such as 
The Spectator and The Tatler.18:01 
While the plays of French Classicism, written for the court theatre, proved 
uncongenial to the German middle class, the moral weeklies provided acceptable 
reading material for Gottsched’s audience and contributed to the establishment of a 
middle-class public opinion. 
Gottsched’s derivative, rule-governed poetics made him an unlikely 
candidate for founder of modern German literature. He functioned, instead, as the 
barrier to be overcome. Opposition arose on various fronts. Basing their arguments 
on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, two Swiss critics, Johann Jakob Bodmer and 
Johann Jakob Breitinger, called for a stronger emphasis on imagination in literary 
production: something virtually ruled out by Gottsched’s mechanical recipes for 
writing poetry. With the first cantos of his epic poem Der Messias (1748; The 
Messiah), Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock succeeded in re-creating the visionary 
heroism of Milton’s theological epics in a German poem on the life of Christ. 

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CONCLUSION
The word «enlightenment», in the broadest sense, means to educate the people, in 
the narrow sense, it refers to the intellectual movement of the period when the 
struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism was in full swing. Perception is the 
main issue. They highly valued human mental activity and human qualities. At the 
same time, the idea of enlightenment is highly valued. (At the head of the state 
should be an educated, just king). 
The Enlightenment originated in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and 
later spread throughout the world. Representatives of this current pay special 
attention to knowledge, they believe that the world can be understood intelligently, 
it should be changed by thinking. The main feature of this stream of literature is 
that it is aimed at rescuing the people from ignorance and backwardness, and calls 
for knowledge and enlightenment. 
Enlighteners believe that the existing social system is imperfect, while man 
acknowledges that he is a sinful slave. But they believe in the human mind. Most 
enlighteners did not deny the existence of God. According to them, existence was 
created by God, but now man is given the freedom to control it. That is why they 
valued human power, its creative power. Representatives of this line believe that 
with intellect and knowledge, man is able to lead the world to goodness. 
They tried to reconcile ‘sociality’ and ‘naturalness’, ‘nature’ and 
‘civilization’. For this reason, the literature of this period is dominated by such 
topics as the journey to strengthen the material basis of culture and enlightenment, 
the struggle and victory of man with nature, the test of human thinking. 

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29 
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