Madame de Staël in Goethe's Weimar 1803-04

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Gerhart Hoffmeister (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Ed. by Gerhard P. Knapp, University of Utah
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.1: German-language Writing and Culture: Germany, 500-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Domains

Literature Topic

Dates

Date of occurrence 1803-1804

Places

Germany (Location)
France (Involved)

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Madame de Staël’s visit to Weimar, the capital of German classicist culture, forms a significant encounter in the early history of cross-national appreciation, with insightful perspectives on entrenched French and German poetic positions and far-reaching ramifications for a subsequent re-evaluation of European cultural affairs. The core of the visit consisted of her meetings with Goethe (and Friedrich Schiller), an extraordinary sequence of events, because a lady of the world (“Weltfrau”, Goethe,

Annalen

“1804”, manuscript 1822, published in 1830) and a world power in her own right got acquainted with the famous German poet. Indeed, to use Thomas Carlyle’s phrase, their encounter “rises beautifully in the imagination” (see his 1832 essay “Schiller, Goethe, and De…

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1636 words

Citation: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "Madame de Staël in Goethe's Weimar 1803-04". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 November 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=13890, accessed 16 April 2024.]

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