Aufklärung

Aufklärung, the German term for the Enlightenment.

Aufklärung, ‘Enlightenment’, term applied to the German phases and aspects of the European movement of rationalism and humanitarianism which extended from the middle of the 17th c. to the beginning of the 19th c. Its systematic philosophical ancestor is Descartes, its first political thinker Hobbes, and its first psychologist Locke. The American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution are its most obvious political manifestations. The scientific aspect of this age is less conspicuous in Germany.

The Aufklärung in Germany is usually said to begin late in the 17th c. with Christian Thomasius, a professor at Leipzig and later at Halle, who viewed his task as the broad propagation of an attitude of commonsense rationalism and humanitarianism. To this end he lectured in German, not in the traditional Latin, and in this spirit he strongly opposed the widespread witch trials and burnings of the age. The first German philosopher of the Aufklärung was Leibniz, but its earliest influential thinker was Christian Wolff, who propounded an easily understandable philosophical system of popularized rationalism. The climax of the philosophical Aufklärung is the work of Immanuel Kant, who also provided its most famous definition: ‘der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit … Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist daher der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung’ (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?). The spread of ‘Enlightenment’ coincided with a rise in the cultural and economic importance of the middle classes (Bürgertum), who provided its principal support and its most characteristic exemplars. It is particularly concerned with social questions within the framework of this class, notably with the position of women.

The first phase of the Aufklärung in literature (1700-50) is marked by the broadly didactic poetry of B. H. Brockes and the efforts of J. C. Gottsched to establish a practical system of poetry and drama based on a commonsense application of French principles. The narrowness of Gottsched's views is overcome by the broader view of the Swiss theorists J. J. Bodmer and J. J. Breitinger. With C. F. Gellert the age became conscious of emotion, praising controlled feelings, which commonly expressed themselves in sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), and rejecting uncontrolled passion.

The highest phase of the literary Aufklärung was reached in the years 1750-80. One side of it is expressed in the urbane and civilized writings of C. M. Wieland, the other in the forthright intellectual clarity of G. E. Lessing, who swept away aesthetic and ethical prejudices, creating a new German drama in Emilia Galotti and, in Nathan der Weise, powerfully advocating religious tolerance. See also Mendelssohn, M., Nicolai, F., and Lichtenberg, G. Ch.

The Sturm und Drang and Romanticism (see Romantik) were to a large extent reactions against the Aufklärung, and although the new Classicism of Goethe and Schiller (see Klassik, Deutsche) likewise reacted against it, both men are considerably indebted to its ethical and aesthetic advances. Many of the fundamental rational, ethical, and social ideas, together with the literary realism which it half-consciously fostered, remained an essential part of the heritage of the 19th c. and 20th c., whose latter decades have produced valuable reassessments.