Empfindsamkeit

Empfindsamkeit, used to denote the strain of sentiment in German literature of the middle and second half of the 18th c. Traces of the cult of emotion, friendship, and love are also perceptible even in earlier years. It runs parallel with the rationalism which is the most obvious feature of the Aufklärung and seems at first sight to be in opposition to it. Yet the sentimental trend can be discerned in the work of Lessing, the foremost exponent of the Aufklärung, in his play Miß Sara Sampson (1755). The word Empfindsamkeit was first used with this connotation, at Lessing's suggestion, by J. J. Bode for the title of the latter's translation of Sterne's Sentimental Journey (Yoricks empfindsame Reise, 1768).

The seeds of this inwardly directed yet effusively expressed emotion are discernible in the early 18th c. among the Pietists (see Pietismus). Traces of the cult of emotion are also to be found in the poetic writings of A. von Haller, in the principal novel of Schnabel ( Die Insel Felsenburg), in the poems of E. von Kleist, and the work and correspondence of Gellert. From the mid-century it is a conspicuous feature in Der Messias and the odes of Klopstock, the early writings of Wieland, Goethe's Werther (see Leiden des jungen Werthers, Die), F. H. Jacobi's novels (see Eduard Allwills Papiere), the poets of the Göttinger Hainbund, especially Hölty, J. M. Miller ( Siegwart), and the brothers Stolberg. Sophie von La Roche ( Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim) and Hermes ( Sophiens Reise nach Sachsen) provide further notable examples of the sentimental style. Goethe's short satirical play Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit is symptomatic of a reaction, and by 1780 the heyday of Empfindsamkeit is past. Its late inheritors are minor figures such as F. von Matthisson.