German cultural nationalism and romanticist theatre

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

First off, as Dave Bisaha appropriately brought up on Monday, the notion of affirming a national theatre based in some kind of local tradition was not new in the late 18th century. Rousseau, in his Letter to Msr. D’Alembert arguing against establishing a French theatre in Geneva, had made claims about a primitive folk culture that should be the true basis of a distinctively Swiss culture. John Dryden had argued that English drama had distinctive qualities superior to that of the French, and David Garrick had devoted most of his life to establishing Shakespeare as a great national poet. With the founding of the Comedie Francaise in 1680, the French had laid claim to a great national dramatic and theatrial tradition worth preserving from generation to generation. And we can look back to Lope de Vega in the early 17th century, and his argument for privileging Spanish uso against the claims of neoclassicism as a kind of primordial national theatre project. These were all promotions of local distinctiveness against claims for universal standards of art.

So what was so special about the arguments laid out by Johann von Herder in the 1760s and 1770s that lets Steve Wilmer claim him as the most important inspiration not only for a German national culture and theatre, but for the modern rhetoric of national culture throughout the world?

Herder encouraged German-speaking people to take pride in their own cultural traditions and their native language. Like Rousseau, he urged them to acknowledge the importance of the folk poets of the past. But unlike Rousseau and those who followed him, Herder promoted the notion that everyone in the world naturally belongs to a nation, that every nation is distinct in its culture and traditions, and that every nation should express the volksgeist, the spirit of its own people in its own unique way.

In this way, he broke through some of the basic assumptions that had informed the debate over neoclassicism for the past two centuries. Rather than worry about what the ancients really meant, or who was authorized to break the rules, he started with the assumption that there are no universal standards for art. Everyone should look for what is unique in the pasts of their own peoples, and this will give them distinct traditions to draw on in formulating an art particular to their own people. The ease with which we nowadays talk about American or English or French or German or Chinese culture as distinct things reflected in the practices of all representatives of those cultures owes a lot to this fundamental shift in thinking. As Wilmer points out, there were significant political consequences. A people with distinct cultural traditions, and a distinct national voice, could make a strong argument for having the right and the natural destiny to have the status of a separate nation-state. So we start to see revolutionaries taking an interest in various kinds of cultural expression, including theatre, as a tool for advancing their goals to establish new states. We see subjects of empires attracted to notions of building a national culture—like much of Europe during the Napoleonic wars, the Finnish in relation to Russia, the Irish in relation to England and the Asian and African peoples colonized by Europe.

Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of invention of tradition is important in this context. Nationalists, of course, would like everybody to think that their claims to distinctiveness are based in reality, that national identity is part of human nature and beyond dispute. The truth is always more ambiguous. The nations of England and France were forged through political and military actions and choices. It took people like John Dryden and David Garrick to promote the notion that there was such a thing as a great dramatic tradition that was distinctively English (rather than being the works of certain people who happened to be English). The disorienting experiences of modernity in the late 18th century with bloody revolutions and huge social uphevals like the industrial revolution made people think about “traditions” with a new kind of nostalgia and to define rigidly practices that had actually been more fluid. To preserve the purity of national origins, nationalists invented traditions that owed nothing to other cultures, conveniently forgetting any kind of complexity that might contradict their distinctiveness.

As Wilmer argues, Herder’s ideas about national culture can be seen in the rhetoric of national theatre projects around Europe and beyond. All these projects show aspects of what John Hutchinson calls cultural nationalism, whose goal is “the moral regeneration of the national community rather than the achievement of an autonomous state.” (64) In Germany, for example, where real political nationhood did not become feasible until the late nineteenth century, cultural nationalism was a significant force building the sense of a national community over the preceding century from the lat 18th century. The goal of such institutions as the German theatres of Hamburg and Munich and Weimar was to build up a national mythology independent from the cultural hegemony of France, England and Italy. As Schiller would put it, “if we had a national stage, we would also become a nation.” (69)

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)