Emil Staiger’s Anti-Modern Classicism: Friedrich Schiller’s Universal Validity versus Friedrich Schlegel’s Subjective and Interesting

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Pages: 103-114
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/KBQP1776

Abstract:

In the article, I discuss the Germanic scholar Emil Staiger’s works, published between 1933 and 1981. Finding out some similar or one and the same formulations, I am urged to apprehend their steadiness as an expression of his convictions. Staiger’s thesis is as follows: with respect to literature and his critical principles, Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel symbolically represent opposite conceptions; they give expression to two ideal types of attitudes not only towards literature, but also towards both man and the world. Schiller’s works are a model, in relation to which the present time should orient aesthetically and socially. The literature, in favour of which Staiger pleads, should be a manly one and consolidating the whole nation. He is against the decadent and delicate literature, confined only in personal psychology. Main characteristic of the works after the epoch of German classical literature is shifting the attention from the universally valid to psychology, to the soul’s dark sides, to the pathological. While the classical is obligatory for everyone, it is standard and natural and concerns the whole community. The classical work unites the community and helps it in its aspiration for an ideal reality, based on moral values. The authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in Europe after the First World War also prefer a certain type of classical art that propagandizes obligatory moral values, represented as valid forever. Staiger does not presume that literary studies, through their terminology and through their choice and analyses of literary works, affirm particular social attitudes and even support certain political tendencies.

Keywords:

Classic; universally valid; antimodern; Antiquity; Friedrich Schiller; Friedrich Schlegel

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